Teo Yoo

Past Lives

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Nora and Hae Sung on the deck of a tourist boat

Past Lives is a woozy but cool romance where much is suggested but little given. The will they/won’t they is endlessly deferred and if not very much happens, what does happen is properly intense. Right to the last second writer/director Celine Song leaves us dangling. Bracket this one with In the Mood for Love, Casablanca and Brief Encounter. Boy meets girl, loses girl, remeets girl and… But the story starts in South Korea, where young schoolkids Hae Sung and Na have a relationship so intense that their parents arrange a mock “date” for them. More as a joke than anything else – Na’s family is about to emigrate to Canada and her mother … Read more

Leto aka Summer

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Mike and Viktor sing together on stage

Edited at home in Moscow by a director under house arrest, Leto is a 2018 movie about life in the Soviet era made by a director living in “democratic” Russia. Any read-across is obviously entirely accidental. Leto means Summer in Russian but this is a spring/autumn tale of a USSR rock star called Mike, his pretty partner Natasha and new kid on the block Viktor. It’s the early 1980s, the New Wave is making inroads into the tightly patrolled Soviet music scene and Mike is adapting to the new sounds/era with a nip here, a tuck there – really he’s an old school long-haired rock guy in the mould of Ian Hunter from … Read more