New Year Blues: More Than a Couple of Romances

At first, New Year Blues doesn't look like your typical, traditional, ensemble romcom: When paralympian snowboarder Kim Rae-wan (Teo Yoo) proposes to horticulturist Han Oh-wol (Choi Sooyoung), he pulls out one of the ugliest engagement rings I've seen in quite some time. And yet... maybe that's intentional. After all, flashy diamonds aren't what love's all about. Travel agent Oh Yong-chan (Lee Dong-hwi) and his Chinese bride-to-be will learn that when his company's embezzled by a new employee. Divorced Detective Kang Ji-ho (Kim Kang-woo) will learn that while enforcing a restraining order for physical therapist Lee Hyo Young (Yoo In-na).

In true fictional feature fashion, all the stories are interconnected: Lee is Kim's rehab go-to and Kang has been assigned to Oh's criminal case. Even the one outlying story involving the recently dumped Min Jin-ah (Lee Yeon-hee) who flees the country for a last-minute holiday trip to Buenos Aires has loose ties to the other stories. Are their narrative narrative improbabilities? Of course. Would a Korean tourist in Argentina really hop on a Vespa driven by an old man who just happens to play the washboard in a cafe band? I doubt it. But I still shed real tears as everything started to come together in the end. There's something lovely about a man getting a pep talk on relationships from his exwife and a bad google translation bringing two future sister-in-laws together. (Nice work, Yeom Hye-ran.) And it's hard not to embrace the feel-good sentiment underlying director Hong Ji-Yeong's final images. "Next year let's be happier than this year."

Past Lives: Seeing Yourself on Screen

Much is made of representation in the media for gays, women, POC, et cetera but you don't hear about it so much when it comes to interracial couples. And it's not like I can't think of examples in film: Anna Deavere Smith and Bill Irwin in Rachel Getting Married; Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner in The Bodyguard. Neither of those movies explored the relationships in racial terms, however. The ones that do — Loving, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner — often do so to the exclusion of everything else. Which makes Past Lives something special. For while the relationship between playwright Nora (Greta Lee) and her husband Arthur (John Magaro) isn't the central story, writer-director Celine Song does take the time to show the frictional sparks, related to the cultural divide as experienced by this married couple.

But Past Lives is much more than that. Something akin to a parable about what happens when your childhood crush (Teo Yoo) reappears in your life not once (digitally) but twice (the latter, in person). As you might guess, the results are poignant, passionate, and ultimately painful. For confronting the past (which inevitably contains the dreams of youth, and a look at our earlier, less corrupted selves) isn't easy. Any adult, whose done the internal work, isn't going to throw everything over to try to recapture what never came to be. But there's a cost that comes with this maturity, one which Past Lives details exquisitely.