The Book of Write-On: Day Seven

Sofia Coppola loves Past Lives.  That’s really all I needed to know.  I was thoroughly on board with the premise of Past Lives anyway, but the Coppola seal of approval elevates it to an absolute essential watch.  It’s probably got strong Lost in Translation vibes, and the parallels don’t stop there.  Past Lives is director Celine Song’s debut feature, as was Lost in Translation for Coppola in 2003. 

I’ve been thinking a little bit about Lost in Translation recently because it was the topic of discussion on this week’s episode of the The Rewatchables podcast.  I listened to it straight away.  I didn’t see it at the cinema when it was released but I bought it on DVD and I fell for it hard.  I was obsessed with this film in my late teens and early twenties.  Maybe I outgrew it or overwatched it, but I haven’t watched it in ten or twelve years.  Now that its twentieth anniversary has rolled around, maybe the studio will release a special edition Blu-ray and that will be catalyst that makes me see it again.  I think I might like to rediscover it in a more organic way.  Maybe late at night after a gig, while flicking through the channels on the television in a budget hotel room.

Maybe Past Lives will be the next Lost in Translation.  My only hope is that Celine Song will continue to make extraordinary pieces of cinema like she’s done with her debut.  Coppola has never managed to recapture the magic of Lost in Translation.  But maybe, like Coppola, Song will get the recognition she deserves.  Coppola won Best Original Screenplay for Lost in Translation.  The Oscar spotlight was thrown onto South Korean cinema after the huge success of Parasite.  One Oscar nomination is a near-certainty.  I actually wouldn’t be surprised if it gets nominated for two or three.   

Past Lives is exactly the film I hoped it would be.  The Guardian called it ‘delicate and sophisticated, but also simple and direct.’  It must be difficult as a filmmaker to do two things at the same time.  It’s tender and complex, that’s for sure – a hard thing for any writer-director to accomplish given that there are so many moving parts in the making of a film.  You can have a feeling or a mood written that comes from the dialogue there on the page, but sometimes it might not translate.  There are so many variables that make it difficult to translate what the director has in their mind’s eye.  

In the case of Past Lives, everything works either very well or extremely well.  I was captivated by it.  I was charmed all the way through, right through to the ending, which was so well-judged.  In Sofia Coppola’s Oscar acceptance speech, she acknowledged Wong Kar-wai as a major influence on her work.  When I left the screening - having had the whole cinema to myself – I told the young woman behind the bar that it had a similar feel to films like Lost in Translation and Kar-wai’s In the Mood For Love.  We could go as far back as David Lean’s Brief Encounter in the onscreen portrayal of a bittersweet love.  The melancholy, the complexity - it fascinates us.  And Past Lives fascinated me, and it sits alongside the very best of them.