LARUSHKA IVAN-ZADEH reviews fine Korean romance, Past Lives

An exquisite romance that is a Brief Encounter for the Zoom era: LARUSHKA IVAN-ZADEH reviews fine Korean romance, Past Lives

Past Lives (12A, 106 mins)

Verdict: Very fine Korean romance 

Rating:

My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 (12A, 92 mins)

Verdict: A big fat disappointment 

Rating:

A Life On The Farm  (12A, 75 mins)

Verdict: Pythonesque portrait of a British eccentric

Rating:

Glitzy premieres at the Venice Film Festival grab international attention, but in the UK one of the finest movies of the year is quietly being released. Past Lives is a miraculously assured debut by Celine Song.

This South Korean-Canadian writer/director delicately mines a very personal autobiography to craft a transcendent tale of enduring love.

As 12-year-old school fellows, Nora and Hae Sung decide they are destined to marry. They go on one chaste ‘date’, basically a play-date in the park chaperoned by their mothers, before Nora and her family emigrate from South Korea to Canada.

Fast-forward 12 years and Nora (an award-worthy Greta Lee) is an ambitious young playwright in New York.

For a laugh, she looks up her old pal (Teo Yoo) on Facebook. They Skype and the chemistry crackles.

Past Lives is a miraculously assured debut by Celine Song. This South Korean-Canadian writer/director delicately mines a very personal autobiography to craft a transcendent tale of enduring love, writes LARUSHKA IVAN-ZADEH

Teo Yoo and Greta Lee as Nora and Hae Sung in Past Lives

But what hope do they realistically have of a non-virtual relationship, given they live on different continents? We skip forward another 12 years to find out.

While there may be no new stories under the sun, Past Lives proves there are always new ways of telling them. Song may have risen from a theatre background. However, her first film is a veritable cinematic masterclass. There is an exquisite, unforced sensitivity and nuance to her eye — and her ear. The sound is as present and potent as the framing.

On paper it’s an immigrant story, with Nora bisected between two cultures, yet it’s a profoundly universal one, too: a study in destiny and the pull of a past self.

Above all, it’s a romance so aching it left me with a painful lump in my throat. At one point Nora explains the spiritual concept of in-yun, where lovers are those you have already met in a previous incarnation and are therefore fated to be together. ‘Though that’s just something Koreans say to seduce someone,’ she laughs. Or is it?

On the surface the soulmates in Past Times are cool — there’s an interesting ‘No sex please, we’re Korean’ vibe. Yet their repressed passion is piercing. A Brief Encounter for the Zoom era.

You may wish the past had remained unexcavated when it comes to My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3. Belated as it is unrequired, this tiresome threequel to the beloved 2002 smash hit sees its now middle-aged heroine, Toula (writer/director Nia Vardalos), take a pilgrimage from Chicago to Greece for a reunion with her misfit immigrant family after the death of their patriarch.

The broad stereotypes and feeble humour hark back to another era — one, indeed, where you could dub something ‘my big fat’ without fear of getting cancelled. Elsewhere, there are various underwritten subplots, an underlying theme about old villages getting hollowed out as the younger generation leave and a predictable gag about trying to climb on to a donkey.

Rural Greece looks ever so attractive, as does original love interest John Corbett, who props up the scenery like an amiable plank.

A Life On The Farm is a celebration of Charles Carson and his movies

It’s hard to hate a romcom this warm-hearted, but it all feels rather amateur. Could easily pass the time on a long-haul flight but not worth taking a trip specifically to watch it.

And now for something completely different . . . unlike anything you’ve seen before, A Life On The Farm celebrates the unique film-making talents of the late Charles Carson.

An eccentric Somerset farmer who devotedly cared for his elderly parents, seemingly at the cost of his marriage (his children are also mysteriously absent), Carson spent lonely hours, even years, shooting a surreal series of vignettes on Coombe End Farm which he recorded on to VHS tapes, most of which are now lost.

Documentary director Oscar Harding teases out the poignant side to Carson’s often hilarious videos and his ‘friendly dark’ fascination with life and, more often, death. Picture Monty Python but with a dead cat (or granny) instead of a parrot.

All films in cinemas now.

The Nun II (15, 150 mins)

Rating:

There’s a certain monster in the Conjuring films. A demonic nun with black eyes and a leering smile. Where did she come from? Nobody cares. Yet now we have the second prequel movie explaining just that.

The Nun II picks up where the original left off, in the 1950s. The nun-thing has possessed the body of a dreamy man, Frenchie (Jonas Bloquet), and is now in a convent school in France, where she hopes to seize the fabled relic of . .. again, nobody cares. 

It’s down to (good) nun Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga) to vanquish the beast for good. Except it’s not for good, is it? We know that the demon makes it to The Conjuring, so there’s nowhere, really, for The Nun II to go.

The Nun II picks up where the original left off, in the 1950s. The nun-thing has possessed the body of a dreamy man, Frenchie (Jonas Bloquet), and is now in a convent school in France, where she hopes to seize the fabled relic of . .. again, nobody cares.

Instead, this film makes an — ahem — habit out of the same type of scene, repeated over and over. A character is lured down a dark corridor by some noise, only to find out that — jump scare! — it’s that darn demon nun again.

And this nun really is dumb. Instead of using her powers to murder anyone in her way, she keeps taking time off to scare les enfants at the school. A nun’s gotta have fun, I guess. But were this not such a handsome production, it would be nigh on unforgivable.

El Conde (15, 110 mins)

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There’s also a nun in Pablo Larrain’s El Conde but, already, I’m getting ahead of myself. Because what you really need to know about this film is that it casts the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (Jaime Vadell) as a centuries-old vampire who’s still sucking the blood of his country and its citizenry. 

You can probably tell from that… El Conde’s satire isn’t subtle. But its black-and-white photography is

And — in a move likely to go down better in Chile than with most voting Brits — the narrator, and Pinochet’s vampiric matriarch, is Margaret Thatcher (Stella Gonet).

You can probably tell from that… El Conde’s satire isn’t subtle. But its black-and-white photography is, and when that nun — part exorcist, part accountant — grills the Pinochet family about their financial misconduct, it feels like a historic reckoning.

The Nun II and El Conde are in cinemas now. El Conde will be on Netflix from September 15.

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