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PAST LIVES

Producers: David Hinojosa, Christine Vachon and Pamela Koffler   Director: Celine Song    Screenplay: Celine Song   Cast: Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, John Magaro, Seung Ah Moon, Seung Min Yim, Ji Hye Yoon, Won Young Choi, Min Young Ahn, Yeon Woo Seo, Kiha Chang, Hee Chul Shin, Jun Hyuk Park, Jonica T. Gibbs, Emily Cass McDonnell, Federico Rodriguez, Conrad Schott and Kristen Sieh    Distributor: A24  

Grade:  B+

At a time when movies are oversaturated with notions of multiple lives, multiple worlds and multiple universes, with results that are usually chaotic and mindlessly convoluted, playwright-turned-filmmaker Celine Song finds a way to treat such concepts in a way that’s direct, deeply personal and emotionally piercing.

“Past Lives” takes the Korean idea of “In-Yun,” which involves the chance, or fateful, encounters that occur between two people over the course of their lives (or series of lives), and applies it to what amounts to a romantic triangle that remains poised between unresolved longing and what might have been—and what might be in the future.  It’s a film about multiple possibilities made not for the adolescent superhero fan but for adults old enough to meditate on the choices they could have made but didn’t and the outcome of those they did.  And it casts a “Brief Encounter”-like spell even if you dismiss In-Yun, as a character in the film herself does at one point, as fanciful.

The film begins at a New York City bar.  Three people—a thirty-something Korean woman (Greta Lee), a Korean man (Teo Yoo) of similar age and a Caucasian man (John Magaro) are sitting with their drinks across from unseen observers, who speculate in voiceover about their relationships based on body language.  The Koreans are facing one another and conversing, the Caucasian brooding a bit, the odd man out.  By the time the scene recurs toward the film’s end, the questions posed by the unidentified watchers—the audience, really—will be answered.

The answer comes in what are in effect three acts.  The first, set in Seoul twenty-four years earlier, introduces twelve-year old classmates Na Young (Seung Ah Moon) and Hae Sung (Seung Min Yim) walking home from school.  Hae Sung has just bested Na Young in a class competition, and the girl is taking the loss hard, to Hae Sung’s distress. 

Their mood is much more upbeat on a playdate Na Young’s mother (Ji Hye Yoon) has arranged for them with Hae Sung’s (Min Young Ahn).  As the kids gambol about in a park, Hae Sung’s mother observes how happy they are, and speculates they might get married.  But Na Young’s discloses that her husband (Choi Won-Young) is taking the family to Canada, and that the playdate is intended to leave her daughter with pleasant memories of her homeland.  On the way home, Na Young falls asleep on Hae Sung’s shoulder, the boy obviously sadder about her departure than she is.

Twelve years later, Na Young, now going by Nora (Lee), has moved to New York City, where she is finishing her degree.  Out of curiosity she begins to search the Internet for her childhood friend, only to discover he’s been looking for her as well.  They connect, and begin conversing in regular Skype sessions.  Hae Sung (Yoo) is studying engineering, and planning to go to China for further training.  Na Young, meanwhile, has landed a spot at a writer’s retreat in Montauk.  Fearing that they might be growing too close, she suggests that they end their long-distance chats for a while, and Hae Sung agrees, though the buddies he drinks with at night note that he seems depressed.  Meanwhile Nora, reaching Montauk, makes the acquaintance of Arthur (Magaro) another young writer-in-residence.

Twelve more years pass, and Nora has been married to Arthur, a successful novelist, for the last seven of them.  She’s surprised to get a message from Hae Sung, now an engineer, saying that he’s coming to New York on vacation and would like to get together.  Their initial meeting is stiff, but grows looser as they walk and talk.  Meanwhile Arthur acts as nonchalant as he can about Hae Sung’s presence, but is inevitably a bit nonplussed by the reappearance of an old friend of his wife’s who can’t help but reawaken thoughts of Korea in her.

One can imagine the direction in which a formulaic Hollywood script might take this situation.  Song defies expectations with a last act that treats all three lead characters with sensitivity and depth.  That might be presumed in the case of Nora and Hae Sung, whom Lee and Yoo embody with extraordinary restraint and inner life, but it’s more surprising in Arthur.  At first you might be ready to dismiss the fellow—who plays video games and whose novel is titled “Boner”—as the sort of immature guy who could explode in a jealous rage; but as portrayed by Magaro, he’s a thoughtful husband who harbors some concern about what might transpire but realizes how important it is for Nora to reconnect with her past, and actually encourages her to do so.  Even more remarkable is the curious bond Arthur develops with Hae Sung in their own brief encounters.  The triangle the unseen observers comment upon in the opening scene is indeed a triangle, but an unexpectedly lovely one.

Song and her collaborators—production designer Grace Yun, cinematographer Shabier Kirchner and editor Keith Fraase—present this tale of personal choices, losses and hopes in a naturalistic style, and at a lapidary pace that never presses; indeed, some might find it dilatory.  (The score by Christopher Bear and Daniel Rossen is similarly understated.)

But the approach allows the characters to express themselves as much, indeed even more, through quiet, halting gestures as through words. And an attentive viewer will be touched by what they convey.  Unlike the typical Hollywood blockbuster, “Past Lives” doesn’t evaporate with the final credits.  It leaves you with something to remember and think about.        

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THE BLACKENING

Producers: Tim Story, Tracy Oliver, E. Brian Dobbins, Marcei A. Brown, Jason Clark and Sharla Sumpter Bridgett   Director: Tim Story   Screenplay: Tracy Oliver and Dewayne Perkins   Cast: Antoinette Robertson, Sinqua Walls, Dewayne Perkins, Grace Byers, X Mayo, Melvin Gregg, Jermaine Fowler, Yvonne Orji, Jay Pharoah, Diedrich Bader and James Preston Rogers   Distributor: Lionsgate

Grade: C

A good idea is squandered in Tim Story’s black-centric spoof of claustrophobic murder mysteries in which a group of characters are trapped in a remote locale with a maniacal killer—think “Bodies Bodies Bodies” with an African-American cast.  Unfortunately it’s more Wayans brothers than Jordan Peele, not scary, or funny, or insightful enough to fulfill the premise’s potential.

The set-up is an old standby: a bunch of college classmates come to an isolated rental house for a reunion.  First to show up are Morgan (Yvonne Orji) and Shawn (Jay Pharaoh), who arranged the get-together; they enter a self-identified Game Room, where they find lots of fun stuff but get locked in. Most prominently displayed on a table is a game called The Blackening, with a board dominated by a hideous plastic Black Sambo face that spouts out a question about black pop culture and demands a correct answer before a timer runs out—or else.  In their case it’s the “or else” that prevails.

Then the others come along.   Sassy, brassy Shanika (X Mayo) bumps into geeky Clifton (Jermaine Fowler) at a roadside store presided over by a glowering clerk (James Preston Rogers) before they make their way to the house.  Driving up together are Lisa (Antoinette Robertson) and her flamboyant gay best friend Dewayne (Dewayne Perkins, one of the co-writers), who’s seething over the presence in the back seat of her cheating but hunky ex Nnamdi (Sinqua Walls), whom she’s giving another chance.  Completing the group are smart-girl Allison (Grace Byers) and mellow ex-gangsta King (Melvin Gregg).

After some perfunctory, mildly catty banter among them—and surprise among the others that Clifton was invited by Morgan—the crew eventually find their way to the Game Room too.  There they too are locked in, learn the unpleasant fates of Morgan and Shawn, and are forced to play the game, which is accompanied periodically by an old television that comes on to show the Sambo head backed up by some minstrel show music.  They quickly realize that failure to answer before time runs out means being shot with a crossbow by a hulking masked man.

The movie has some success sending up genre stereotypes—the advertising tagline, based on the cliché that in the usual run of horror movies, the solitary black character is always the first to die—is, if outdated, still true enough to get a laugh.  And the rat-a-rat back-and-forth among the characters is sometimes sharp, though too often merely puerile.  The introduction of a forest ranger (Diedrich Bader) who’s even identified by one of the group as a potential white savior, or killer (and whose name is White to boot) is amusing, if hardly terribly creative, too. 

The writing also gets points for trying, at least, to cut deeper than mere jokiness.  The game’s questions can be revealing about society’s expectations about black people, and they get especially nasty when it demands that the characters choose “the blackest” of them to be sacrificed.  That’s a particular dig at Allison, whose father is white, and King, who’s married a white woman, though when the decision is reached it’s on other grounds.

But while the comic elements are sporadically amusing, the mystery falls completely flat.  Any reasonably savvy moviegoer—especially those knowledgeable in horror tropes—will know who the ultimate villain is by the halfway point, since the script resorts to a device to conceal it that’s transparently ineffectual.  It also resorts to a reveal in the last act so dumb it’s not worth talking about.

Worse, all the stuff regarding the murders is messily constructed, poorly choreographed and clumsily shot by scripters Perkins and Tracy Oliver, director Story, cinematographer Todd A. Dos Reis and editor Peter S. Elliot.  Many of the sequences of the characters scurrying about—dividing themselves into two groups to allow for more scenes of mayhem, of course—are so murky and ineptly staged that they become laughable for all the wrong reasons.  Throughout all the performances are wildly over-the-top, with Perkins, Mayo and Bader especially broad, and Dexter Story’s score insistently irritating.

With sharper writing and better direction, “The Blackening” could have been a real winner.  And even with its lack of cleverness, it could register with viewers looking for a midnight-movie sort of communal experience.  But overall it ends up as a missed opportunity.