No, Justin Chang — Celine Song’s Past Lives is not “the most affecting love story in ages.”
Song tries to finesse this gently agreeable but wispy, faint-pulse love story into a kind of continent–traversing Brief Encounter, but she doesn’t quite have the chops or…whatever, the somersaulting, pole-vaulting panache.
A recently premiered film that actually deserves this effusive praise is Tran Unh Hung’s The Pot au Feu.
I’m trying to understand why Chang and several other elite critics are so over the moon over this thing. They’re just undercutting their cred by over-praising it…doing themselves no favors.
