One of the year’s best films, Celine Song’s Korean-American love story, now on streaming and DVD, continues cinema’s rich tradition of immigrant stories, from Chaplin to Persepolis
Awards season often tends to benefit the newer, shinier end-of-year releases that are freshest in voters’ memories, but Celine Song’s lovely, low-key Past Lives appears to be quietly staying the course. Having premiered way back in January, hit cinemas in the summer and since become available to stream – with the DVD out last week for physical media loyalists – it is now routinely popping up on best-of-2023 lists, and scooped best feature at the Gotham awards in the US. Something sticks in the mind and heart about Song’s melancholic, gentle but emotionally acute tale of a rekindled relationship between a Korean-American immigrant and the childhood friend she left behind in Seoul. Anyone whose life has been split across countries can relate to its study of the split identities and frayed possibilities of immigrant existence.
It’s those infinitely complex internal tensions – at once universally recognisable and particular to each individual – atop external fish-out-of-water challenges that make the immigrant experience such a rich and recurring film subject. As early as 1917, English émigré Charlie Chaplin distilled all those dynamics in his 22-minute short The Immigrant (Internet Archive), playing his signature Little Tramp character’s calamitous voyage to, and overwhelmed arrival in, New York for maximum comedy and pathos. Nearly 100 years later, American director James Gray took the same title for a rather more solemn look at a European ingenue seeking a new life in the Big Apple, meeting with ugly exploitation and poisoned ardour. Gray’s The Immigrant (2013) plays as symphonically grand tragedy, but retains that old romantic mythos around the US as a place to make or remake yourself.
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