In Review: 'Past Lives,' 'Flamin' Hot'

The lives and loves of past and present intermingle in Celine Song's beautiful directorial debut. Spices intermingle with Cheetos in a fact-free true story.

Past Lives
Dir. Celine Song
106 min.

Late in Past Lives, two men sit in a bar making conversation that’s halting and palpably tense for reasons other than the language gap that divides them. One is Hae Sung (Teo Woo), an engineer from Seoul. The other is Arthur (John Magaro), a Jewish novelist from New York. Nothing unites them but Nora (Greta Lee), Arthur’s wife and Hae Sung’s childhood sweetheart. In the background, a song plays from John Cale’s 1974 album Fear whose chorus is simply its title sung repeatedly: “You know more than I know.” It could be the inner dialogue of either character.

The feature film debut of playwright Celine Song, Past Lives lets the moment linger. Song lets a lot of moments linger. Her film is as interested in what happens when characters aren’t talking to one another as when they are, and by the time Arthur and Hae Sung have their first moment alone with one another, both have an understanding of their situation that neither needs to clarify. Each knows aspects of Nora the other never will. Arthur remembers Nora first as the emerging playwright he fell in love with when both attended a writers retreat. Hae Sung’s earliest memories of her date back further to their childhood in Seoul, when they’d compete for top grades and before she’d changed her name to Nora from Na Young and emigrated with her family to Canada, a time neither has forgotten even as it tumbles further into the past.

Past Lives unfolds in three parts, flashing back 24 years to Nora and Hae Sung’s childhood in Seoul after an opening in which a pair of unseen characters try to figure out what relation Hae Sung, Nora, and Arthur have to one another. It then leaps forward twice. In one sequence, Nora and Hae Sung reconnect online in the early ’10s. She’s building a life for herself in the lower rungs of New York’s theater world. He, fresh off mandatory military service, still lives at home and studies engineering. One Skype session leads to another until the two are scheduling their days around their increasingly wistful exchanges. Then, in the film’s final stretch, Hae Sung and Nora reunite in New York, their lives having gone in separate directions since the last time they spoke to one another.

But does that matter? Walking through the same New York park where she and Arthur courted, Nora and Hae Sung discuss inyun, a Korean concept of connections built over the course of many lives and a force capable of bringing and keeping people together. In another scene, she talks to Arthur about the seemingly random circumstances that brought them together. At a certain point, do chance and fate start to become indistinguishable? Does one have a greater hold on a life than the other? 

Drawing from her own life, Song offers no answers, letting her characters ponder them over the course of an unhurried film filled with gentle camera pans and long shots of characters walking and talking as they consider paths untaken and paths they might still take. At once clear-eyed and swooningly romantic, Past Lives is all the more effective for the contradictions it does nothing to resolve, inching toward a bittersweet recognition that the satisfactions and happiness of the life we’ve chosen has to compete with the bittersweet possibilities of the life that might have been. —Keith Phipps

Past Lives is in select theaters now.

Flamin’ Hot
Dir. Eva Longoria
99 min.

Let’s just print the legend here. Let’s pretend that the rags-to-riches story of Richard Montañez is true and that he created Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, a sensation that lifted him from the janitorial staff at Frito-Lay’s Rancho Cucamonga plant to the company’s executive class. Let’s pretend that the Los Angeles Times didn’t write a story in May 2021 that exposed Montañez’s claims as pure fiction, which he’d spun into a book (A Boy, a Burrito and a Cookie: From Janitor to Executive), lucrative speaking engagements, and a tidy piece of snacking mythology for his employer. Let’s even pretend that the makers of Flamin’ Hot weren’t wholly aware of this nonsense and chose to move forward with the film anyway. 

Because in our current season of corporate origin stories—from Air Jordans to Blackberries to Tetris—none have quite had the audacity to suggest, as Flamin’ Hot does, that the brands will save us. In recent years, it’s become a strange and distressing phenomenon to see people grow invested in giant corporations as the drivers of social change. There are wars currently raging over the use of a transgender TikTok influencer in a Bud Light campaign or the casting of a Black lead in the live-action version of The Little Mermaid, and on both sides of that war, there is the understanding that companies are the arbiters of culture. If you are not validated by Disney, you are invisible. 

That’s the thinking that goes into Flamin’ Hot, and it’s surely the reason why Frito-Lay was happy to allow Montañez’s myth to flourish and why they’ve given first-time feature director Eva Longoria the freedom to plaster their logo in every corner of the screen. (A couple of the executives are made to seem like squares, but that’s the price of doing business.) To Longoria and her screenwriters, Lewis Colick and Linda Yvette Chávez, Montañez represents the classic arc of immigrants in America, the son of Mexican migrant workers whose hard work and ingenuity not only lifted his family but helped make an entire culture feel seen. It’s the allegedly inspiring story of Frito-Lay acknowledging an untapped market. 

In Longoria’s energetic telling, which borrows much of its pop from Martin Scorsese, Montañez grew up in a vineyard in Guasti, California—a time he remembers fondly, even though his playground “was everybody else’s labor camp.” In school, young Montañez is bullied and subjected to racial taunts, though he shows some early marketing initiative in selling his mom’s burritos to white kids at 25 cents a pop. As an adult, played by Jesse Garcia, his lack of education leads to an ugly stretch as a drug dealer and when he finally listens to his wife Judy (Annie Gonzalez) and seeks out a normal job, times are hard. 

Montañez catches a huge break getting the janitor job at Frito-Lay, and he flashes ambition right away, developing a close friendship with a machinist (Dennis Haysbert) who shows him around. As the company’s fortunes start to dwindle, he answers an appeal from CEO Roger Enrico (Tony Shalhoub) to pitch ideas and gets the inspiration to give Cheetos the same kick he gets from Mexican corn. And so, after some experimentation with spice mixes, he comes up with a formula to present to Enrico, and the rest is red-dusted-finger history. 

Though Longoria does nothing to cast a scintilla of doubt on Montañez’s story, she does at least acknowledge that telling stories is a big part of who he is, which gives a certain punch to the voiceover narration, as if we’re the ones hearing his pitch. There’s no question, either, that Flamin’ Hot is sincere in championing a Mexican-American underdog who was unbowed by poverty and racism, and able to will himself to the top of the corporate food chain. But there’s something fundamentally disheartening about Montañez having his value affirmed by a benevolent CEO like Enrico, who was simply desperate to shovel more salty snacks in American maws. This shouldn’t be thought about as a great moment in Mexican-American history, even if it wasn’t a bunch of bullshit. Let us resolve to print better legends. —Scott Tobias

Flamin’ Hot debuts tomorrow on Hulu and Disney+