Meant to Be

One of the truly wonderful things about my job is that I get to see the future.

Thanks to our relationships with various distributors and producers – and the fact that I occupy a unique space between festival programmer and year-round Lightbox programming consultant – I frequently get the chance to see movies months before everyone else will. Sometimes that means I’ll see something truly great, and know it’s an instant classic; the only downside is that I have to wait for the world to catch up.

Which is to say I've been thinking about Past Lives for a very long time. Celine Song’s study of Korean-born New Yorker Nora (Greta Lee), who finds herself re-evaluating her choices and her very self when Hae-seung, the boy she thought was her soulmate back home, reappears in her life two decades later as an extremely appealing man (Teo Yoo) who clearly still carries a torch for the girl who disappeared. Of course Nora isn’t the same person she was when she left Korea – she’s building a career as a writer, and married to a quiet, decent guy named Arthur (John Magaro) – but Hae-sung’s arrival is a seismic event, bringing up all sorts of unexpected emotions and destabilizing all three of their lives, whether they want to admit it or not.

It's a Sliding Doors situation, played internally: “Who would I have been if I'd stayed?” and Song's approach lays out the conflict as well as the impossibility of resolving it. We don't need a big outburst from Arthur because he wears his concern and conflict on his face – and we already know he sees himself as just a speed bump delaying the inevitable consummation of Nora and Hae-seung's epic love story. (I haven’t always been Magaro’s biggest fan, but he’s perfect for this role.)

Similarly, we don't need a scene where Hae-seung asks Nora to choose him because we can see how hard he's trying not to. Teo Yoo finds exactly the right line for the character -- engaged, interested, compassionate and uncertain in a way that reads as appealing rather than indecisive.

It's the same with Greta Lee's performance; finally confronted with the reality of Hae-seung after decades of wondering, Nora does everything she can to keep him an abstract concept even when he’s right next to her, and Lee carries the contradiction of attraction and denial, moving and speaking very carefully as if she’s afraid of slipping up.

Past Lives is very much a playwright's first feature, with long dialogue scenes that risk feeling too static. But Song is a good playwright, and her characters are drawn well enough that I really appreciated the time spent with them, to watch closely as Nora weighs the trajectory of her life – towards New York and Arthur, but away from Hae-seung and home – over the course of the last act, which finds a resolution that’s exquisitely structured, emotionally devastating, and the only way this story could end. Trust me on this; I’ve had a lot of time to think about it.

Also new to the shelves is What’s Love Got to Do With It?, which premiered at last year’s festival – I moderated a really fun post-screening Q&A, as it happens – but took its time rolling into theaters, possibly because North American distributors didn’t really know what to do with it. Shout Studios released it earlier this summer, and now Shekhar Kapur’s cross-cultural rom-com is out on disc, where it’ll likely find a devoted audience looking for a pleasant enough diversion. And weirdly, its core concept is a mirror image of Past Lives’ basic hook, being about a couple of childhood friends who spend a whole movie wondering whether their comfort with one another as adults might lead to something more.

Zoe (Lily James) and Kaz (Shazad Latif) grew up next door to one another in a London borough, and as adults they’re living very different lives – neither of them entirely fulfilling. Kaz’ dissatisfaction with the dating scene has led him to decide to try an arranged marriage, allowing his parents to choose a suitable bride for him back in Lahore; on learning this, Zoe decides to accompany Kaz on his journey and make a documentary about it.

Unlike Past Lives, there’s no real question as to where this is going: What’s Love Got to Do With It? is comfort food, the kind of movie that earnestly asks whether these two mixed-up and incredibly attractive young people will realize true love has been staring them in the face this whole time and immediately whispers “Ah, just wait a couple hours.”

It’s bright and breezy and cheerful, its pandering just this side of shameless, quietly reinforcing the expectations of its target Western audience while also indulging in a little exoticism here and there for the travelogue set. (Pakistan, as it turns out, is a nation of contradictions!) Kapur and screenwriter Jemima Khan have clearly studied the Richard Curtis canon for tips and tricks, loading the story with intertwined subplots and eccentric supporting characters. Emma Thompson is having a lot of fun as Zoe’s obnoxious mother, who considers herself the life of every party and cannot be persuaded otherwise; Shabana Azmi gets the slightly more serious role of Kaz’s mum, whose feelings about marriage are a little more complex than everyone else’s, and it all bops along very nicely until it reaches its inevitable destination.

It’d be a far less satisfying picture without Latif, who gives a proper movie-star performance here after a string of projects that didn’t quite break him out, like the muddled first couple of seasons of Star Trek: Discovery and the risible Screenlife thriller Profile. Kaz is a romantic hero, and Latif is effortlessly charming and charismatic, with a relaxed confidence that doesn’t quite conceal his longing for genuine romance – and, ultimately, for Zoe. James has a little less lifting to do, but she’s clearly enjoying herself, and it’s nice to see her in a looser role than she’s usually given.

The featurette included on Shout’s disc – the only supplement aside from the theatrical trailer – reveals that James and Latif have been pals for more than a decade, which might explain why they initially feel like siblings rather than love interests. But they’re good actors, so they make the pairing work – and having learned that after the fact, I was a little disappointed at the lack of deleted scenes or a blooper reel just to see them drop their characters in the moment.

(The featurette also reveals that most of the Lahore interiors were shot on London soundstages, and that director Kapur is frankly terrible at COVID masking. But he seemed hale enough when we met last September, so at least that worked out.)

Supplements on Elevation’s BD of Past Lives, by contrast, are copious and intimate, starting with a feature audio commentary from Song, Lee and Yoo and a 20-minute featurette, “Bound by Fate”, which lets cast and crew discuss the film from a more metaphysical perspective, taking the title much more literally than I ever did. It’s a fascinating new angle on the story which I reject completely; your mileage may vary, of course. The disc also includes a handful deleted scenes, including a glimpse of Nora’s life in Toronto. Representation matters, you know.

And before I sign off, there’s one other new release that features a culturally displaced character who’s a much more literal fish out of water: Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken is a DreamWorks Animation fantasy comedy about, yes, a teenager who feels out of place in the seaside hamlet of Oceanside because, well, her entire family are secretly krakens who’ve chosen to live among the surface folk.

Ruby (voiced by Lana Condor), her parents (Toni Collette and Colman Domingo) and kid brother (Blue Chapman) have assimilated pretty well – they just tell everyone they’re Canadian, and because this is a kids’ movie that settles it – but “normal” life has its own pressures: There’s a cool new kid (Annie Murphy) at school, and maybe she’s got her eye on Ruby’s crush Connor (Jaboukie Young-White), and also prom is coming and what if he doesn’t ask Ruby out. All of which gets put to the side when Ruby discovers she’s the secret heir to a matriarchal undersea kingdom of giant krakens – who are not the monsters the myths made them out to be, but benevolent (if huge) sea creatures who keep the world safe from mermaids, among other things – and finds herself torn between claiming her birthright and just being a regular girl. And did I mention the whole mermaids-are-evil thing? Because that comes back.

There’s not much that’s groundbreaking or original about Ruby Gillman, which is your standard chosen-one narrative with a sea-kingdom setting; honestly, a huge chunk of it feels like it was lifted from an early draft of James Wan’s Aquaman. But of course I am not the target audience for this movie, and the kids at whom it’s aimed will probably enjoy it a lot; it moves very quickly, the visuals are gorgeous and eccentric, Condor gets the zero-to-hero transition just right and Will Forte and Sam Richardson provide nonstop comic relief as a kraken-hunting sailor called Gordon Lighthouse and Ruby’s funcle Brill, respectively. The plot is pretty obvious, but again that probably won’t bother children, and if the screen grabs here look interesting you could probably do a lot worse than watch it on a slow night, especially if you’re trying to be a funcle to your own younger relations.

Universal’s Blu-ray supplements a lovely 1080p presentation with an engaging crew commentary that assembles director Kirk DeMicco (Vivo), co-director Faryn Pearl, producer Kelly Cooney Cilella, character animation head Carlos Fernandez Puertolas and cinematography head Jon Gutman to talk about every aspect of the film; there’s also a fun featurette about the challenge of ADR that goes a little deeper into the process of making CG animation than most. The rest of the supplements are aimed at kids, which – again – is the reason this movie exists. So you can skip ’em if you’re busy.

Past Lives is available on Blu-ray from Elevation Pictures in Canada and Lionsgate in the US; What’s Love Got to Do With It? is available from Shout! Studios in the US, and available in Canada as an import. Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken is available from Universal Studios Home Entertainment pretty much everywhere.

Coming soon: More space fun with Jean-Luc Picard, and the second Star Trek: Prodigy set offers a vanished Trek show a chance to endure. Upgrade that subscription so you don’t miss anything!