haitangkitty

This past month I've watched both films Celine Song has made. She is a Korean born Canadian director/playwright and both her works have sparked lot of interest. Apparently both films have been strongly influenced by her own life, the first film being autobiographical and in the second film she has done the same job as the protagonist. As she has made her relationship public it has sparked discourse about her personal life too and her notions of love since her husband is a screenwriter who also has also made love triangle films :D However, I'm not interested in the psychology of the director but the films as their own works.

Both films are romances with love triangle set in New York, but they are very different kinds of films. Song talks about love and dating a lot in her interviews and of course the topic interests me as someone who watches mainly romance media (although not heterosexual).

Spoiler free reviews:

Past Lives (2023)

I was supposed to watch this when it was in the cinemas but somehow i missed it, but luckily it was just added to Netflix. I have seen previous work of the main actors: Teo Yoo in the Russian band film Leto(2018), and Greta Lee had a minor character role in the series Girls(2012-2017).
I really enjoyed this film, it made me emotional. Growing up in two cultures, especially the immigrant experience, might seem like you have two completely different lives. The film is a bittersweet romance and it deals with issues such as connecting with your heritage and growing up in a white society, how our partners shape our lives and our culture and success, what is familiar and what is foreign, and of course - what is love. It is all done very beautifully. There's a lot of yearning in this film! After watching it i thought about it a lot in the following days.

The Materialists (2025)

I'm personally not that interested in the actors in this film, and i only watched this film because it sparked lot of discourse online and i liked the director's previous film. This film is a love triangle as well. Of course when people engage with the film they don't think about which character they want, they think about do they want Chris Evans or Pedro Pascal(who seems to be the fan favorite at the moment). I don't consider Dakota Johnson a good actress, she's a bit bland.

The film is not a beautiful romance like Past Lives, this is more like a satire(i mean not exactly, but it has that exaggeration and emotional distance). Some people have pointed out that the dialogue makes them feel stupid, but it is done so in purpose. The protagonist is a matchmaker for the very rich. How the clients behave are similar way to what online dating is: how tall and fit they are, their ethnicity, salary, how "high value" they are. The protagonist has a very cliche love triangle between a poor man and a rich man - does she choose love or money? The film talks a lot about how dating the right person makes them feel valuable, or dating the wrong person makes them feel worthless.

This film sparked lot of outrage on social media because of which man the protagonist chose at the end of the film. The film is definitely a conversation starter, but it doesn't have that much artistic value to me. It did make me think about my agony over heterosexual dating and online dating. The current dating life makes people very desensitized to not see people as people but as categories. It's very harsh and disconnected from humanity in my opinion, so i do agree with Song's message of the film.

The online discourse made me realize how far i'm from the "normal" straight women even though i'm bi and have dated men i feel like i'm not as traditional and have that many rules about dating and gender, and also i don't consider money to be a big issue when it comes to dating. Personally, i connected more to the protagonist of Past Lives.