![]() Although both Hanks and Ryan had been favored for the lead roles from the beginning, several other actors expressed interest in both parts, while Hanks often disagreed with Ephron over his character's material. Ward and Ephron were among several writers hired to re-write the script into a funnier film, with Ephron eventually being promoted to director once Nick Castle departed over disagreeing with her comedic approach. Foster strongly believed in the film's potential but struggled to get it made by TriStar Pictures for several years, finding its emotional script promising but unsophisticated. Arch submitted his script to producer Gary Foster in 1990. ![]() Several studios rejected his script, deterred by the idea that its main couple does not meet for nearly the entire film. Inspired by the romance film An Affair to Remember (1957), Sleepless in Seattle was conceived as a romantic drama by Arch in 1989. In addition to Bill Pullman, Ross Malinger, and Rob Reiner, the film features an ensemble supporting cast also consisting of Rosie O'Donnell, Gaby Hoffmann, Victor Garber, Rita Wilson, Barbara Garrick, and Carey Lowell. Starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, the film follows a journalist (Ryan) who, despite being newly engaged, becomes enamored with a recently widowed architect (Hanks), when the latter's son calls in to a talk radio program requesting a new partner for his grieving father. I feel so not Korean when I’m with him.Sleepless in Seattle is a 1993 American romantic comedy-drama film directed by Nora Ephron, from a screenplay she wrote with David S. ![]() “We’re not babies any more.” Later, with a diasporic flair that is both humorous and heartbreaking, she notes that Hae Sung is “ So Korean. “We were just babies then,” Nora tells Hae Sung in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. Together, those words mean one thing apart, they imply another.Ī further leap of 12 years brings us back to that bar, revisiting the opening scene from a different perspective – or, more accurately, from three differing perspectives. It’s no accident that when the film’s title appears on screen, the two words “Past” and “Lives” are separated by a great space. Yet Song is more interested in exploring how people change than how they stay together – how identity is defined as much by where we are now as who we were then. When the Korean concept of in-yun (a personal connection transcending lifetimes) is explicitly invoked and discussed, Past Lives seems set to become a traditional “made for each other” romance with a familiar love-triangle twist. There’s something quite breathtaking about the deceptive ease with which Song juggles the metaphysical and matter-of-fact Now in New York, she has stopped crying, partly because “nobody cared” and partly because she is no longer the person she used to be, having reinvented herself in a different time, a different culture. Together, they talk about everything and nothing – the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind how close they were as kids how he would comfort her when she cried. He’s done his military service and is studying engineering, while she has become a playwright. Twelve years later, the pair are reunited virtually via Facebook and Skype, sharing glitchy conversations conducted at opposite ends of the day, on opposite sides of the world. “He’s manly,” she declares, “I’ll probably marry him.” But her artistic parents have other plans, emigrating to Toronto, thereby separating the prospective sweethearts. We open in a New York bar, where an unseen patron asks: “Who do you think they are to each other?” Cinematographer Shabier Kirchner’s 35mm camera gazes in long shot at a trio of customers – South Korean Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), Korean-Canadian migrant Nora (Greta Lee) and Jewish American Arthur (John Magaro) – and the faceless voice has “no idea” how they might be related, whether as siblings, colleagues or lovers.įrom here we spiral back 24 years to Seoul, where schoolfriends Na Young (Nora’s original name) and Hae Sung have a competitive connection. The result, which has one foot in South Korea and the other in North America, feels at times like an impossible mashup of Davy Chou’s Return to Seoul and Nora Ephron’s Sleepless in Seattle, shot through with a stoical melancholia that recalls the final scenes of Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story. Combining the aching yearning of Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love with the casual intimacy of Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy, it paints a picture of unresolved affection as delicate as it is profound, interweaving timeless themes of fate and providence with more playfully down-to-earth musings on happenstance and shapeshifting identity. This supremely confident feature debut from Korean-Canadian writer-director Celine Song is a spine-tingling gem – a tale of not-so-brief encounters between star-crossed souls, played out over a period of 24 years.
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