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Past Lives…several months on


As usual during a sunny weekend, a song was spilling out of the windows and doors of the flat next door.  If the conditions were right and I had a window open, weed smoke would drift in uninvited.      

My young neighbour’s music and smoking habits wasn’t an issue for me.  If anything, I was just a little disappointed thatI’d yet to recognise a song.  But two or three weeks after I’d moved in, while I was on my way to the shed, my ears pricked up.  But it was being sung by Rihanna. It was a very different version to the original, but I liked it.  It made me stop dead in the middle of the garden as I was transported back to the moment I fell in love with Past Lives.  


Go back.  Go back before I urged a dozen friends to see Past Lives.  Go back before I got a film poster of it for Christmas.  Go back before I watched it for a third time on Blu-ray.  Keep going back.  Go back before I saw it for a second time with my brother and his fiancé at The Cameo in Edinburgh, having absolutely insisted they see it with me.  Go back further still: before I saw it the first time at the cinema in my hometown of Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire.  I was there for the first screening and I had the cinema to myself.  It was before all of that.  Go back. 


I’d been sucked into the year’s big film phenomenon.  Having seen Barbie, I jumped onto the box office juggernaut of a fan-fuelled bandwagon that was Barbenheimer.  You’ve seen Barbie, therefore you must see Oppenheimer.  I wasn’t exactly sure who was telling me that, but I didn’t want to be the guy who hadn’t experienced Barbenheimer.  It felt culturally significant.  I didn’t want it to be the modern-day equivalent of being sat on the toilet during the moon landings.  I had to complete the double bill for good or bad.  


Thumbs down.  Too big, too talky.  Not my thing.  But I’m still glad I did it because here’s the silver lining: they showed the Past Lives trailer.  This was more to my taste: a quiet littleromantic chamber piece rather than the epic ensemble megamovie that was Oppenheimer.  The trailer, helped in no small part by Cat Power’s song vocals, built to a touching crescendo - so touching in fact that the final moment in the trailer almost made me cry.  I knew I had to see it.  


Stay by Cat Power went onto become my song of 2023. Everything about it was so unmistakably Cat Power that it didn’t even occur to me that it might be a cover.  But courtesy of my weed-smoking, music-loving neighbour, I discovered it was a hit for Rihanna first.  Stay has become a Cat Power/Rihanna double bill.  Less successful than Barbenheimer maybe, but a double bill I actually like.  

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