Stories of the boy who meets/loves/loses the girl have become the subject of easy and usually deserved ridicule, the beats typically following those of played-out fiction rather than lived in fact. Despite direct experience of the highs and lows of romance, we’ve grown accustomed to a heavy suspension of disbelief on screen, accepting dusty cliche over the messiness of what we really know.
There can be pleasure to this, especially within a more finely engineered romcom, but it can often add an unnecessary distance, pushing us away when we want to be pulled in close. There are many, many reasons to crumble while watching Celine Song’s skin-tingling debut Past Lives and why it’s the best of this year’s Oscar crop – the look, the sound, the performances – but what affects most is its unusual honesty. Spanning decades and covering continents, the playwright-turned-film-maker’s story of an almost love never makes us question or doubt, partly because the tale is loosely autobiographical but mostly because every decision Song makes is one of almost radical maturity.
