Past Lives (2023)
I completely fail to understand why this was one of the highly recommended movies of 2023, but I am clearly in a minority here. Right from the hokey first scene, I felt like I was watching a well produced parody of a whimsical indie romance drama film. Abstract spa music and drenching everything in sunset colors doesn’t make it artsy, more like it is mocking the type of movie it tries to be. I can see the inspiration from and why it gets compared to Linklater and Wong Kar-wai, but this is so far from those. The dialogue is horribly expository, clunky and unconvincing. It does have brief moments where the actors shine through, and I could see some potential for it not being a typical “right person, wrong time” type of story with its elements of reflection of living different lives in different countries and with a new language, but that was not explored nearly deep enough to really stand out.
Rating: 2.5