Peter Bradshaw’s review about Past Lives is so astute that I don’t have anything more to say about this wonderful feature debut by Celine Song. Read this: “This is a story of lost love and childhood crush, the painful and dangerous access to the past given by digital media; the roads not taken, the lives not led, the futile luxury of regret. And it’s a movie that speaks to the migrant experience and the way this creates lifelong alternative realities in the mind: the self that could have stayed behind in the old country, versus the one that went abroad for a new future.”
And how fitting the circumstances were under which I watched it. I started watching it on the plane back to Seattle from China two months ago by myself, only for about half an hour before the plane landed and me back to the role of a mother. I resumed it on the plane to China from Seattle three days ago again by myself but had to pause it due to my eyes aching from crying (not over the film but my mother). I finally finished it at 3am lying on the bed where mom was used to. I have always been all about going to new places, better places, bigger dreams, but I am just a Chinese girl from a tiny village in China, being instructed and cared by dozens of uncles and aunties and brothers and sisters about every step in mom’s funeral, after having left the village 25 years ago. I miss her.
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May 2024
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