Celine Song’s wonderful movie prompts Harry Eyres to reflect on a lifetime of Burgundy.
The beautiful, exquisitely shot and acted, heartbreakingly poignant film Past Lives, directed by the Korean-Canadian playwright Celine Song, plays strange tricks with time. The action jumps forward and backward in great leaps (after the short opening scene, it jumps back 24 years, then forward 12 years, then forward another 12 years, and briefly backward again), but almost without seeming to. It’s an unconsummated love story, and it’s about how people are both the same and not the same through time. In terms of the title, it’s about how past lives in some way continue to exist and reverberate in the present, even though they are also irredeemably past.
For some reason, this wonderful movie made me think of my relationship with Burgundy and its wines (the film has absolutely nothing to do with either wine or Burgundy) and forged a link between my most recent experiences of Burgundy (the wine), consisting of various tastings of the 2022 vintage, and one of my very first trips to Burgundy, the wine region, in fact specifically to the village of Vosne-Romanée, way back in the cold spring of 1987.
That’s 37 years ago—longer than Mozart lived—and I suppose all the usual clichés apply. I was in my 20s and just starting out on the path of wine writing (always mixed with other kinds of writing), having left a teaching post that my parents regarded as a mercifully
This Article was originally published on World of Fine Wine
