After Yang (Kogonada, 2021) (Patreon)

Quite often there is a significant disparity between how films are received at festivals versus their broader release. This is usually attributed to the hothouse atmosphere of festivals like Cannes, where the press corps is watching multiple films a day and are asked to render snap judgments on all that "bulk viewing." After Yang, the follow-up to Kogonada's stately debut Columbus, was largely dismissed last year when it premiered in Un Certain Regard, but its critical fortunes seem to be improving now. Ironically, though, this seems to have quite a bit to do with the film itself, and how Kogonada's specific set of cinematic reference points will maybe seem more original when the work is set apart from several dozen better, more original films. Isolation can only help After Yang.

This is a hard film to evaluate, partly because it has no obvious flaws. It is meticulously designed and orchestrated, and it works very diligently to elucidate its chosen themes. But like Columbus, After Yang seems overly mannered and self-conscious, trying to hit a few too many notes that we associate with masterpieces. For a film so concerned with existential concepts of humanity, mortality, and memory, After Yang is essentially a retread of bolder, riskier films. What Kogonada contributes, for the most part, is a portentous mood, glacial and underlit, all the better to signify great cinema without really achieving it. Despite its ambitions, After Yang looks a bit paltry when compared with those films that clearly inspired it.

Late Ozu is all over After Yang. (In his review for the L.A. Times, Justin Chang astutely referred to Kogonada's film as I Was Born, Bot.) The story of a death in the family, After Yang uses somewhat standard sci-fi / futuristic tropes to consider what, if anything, makes us human. The film is mostly a kind of Bergmanian rendition of Blade Runner, mounted with strategies quite familiar from Asian master-shot filmmaking: Hou, Tsai, Kore-eda, and yes, Edward Yang. A busy professional couple, Jake (Colin Farrell) and Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith) adopted a daughter from China, named Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja). In order to ease the tensions in cross-cultural adoptions, a number of companies sell "techno-sapien" big siblings to help children connect with their birth heritage. Yang (Justin H. Min) is one such bio-android, part flesh and blood but controlled by a CPU instead of a brain. Yang has been part of Mika's family for as long as she can remember, and when he "dies" (shorts out, melts down, what have you), she is devastated. So Jake works to find whether Yang can be rebooted before his organic components start to decompose.

There is an almost aggressive stillness to After Yang. It's shot in rectilinear architectural interiors, and no one ever raises their voice. When Jake jailbreaks Yang and gains access to his recorded memories, he has to grapple with the fact that this being, who was at least partly designed to introduce spyware into private homes, has had a number of distinct lifetimes and engaged in human-like relationships apart from his designated family functions. He even had a girlfriend, Ada (Haley Lu Richardson), herself a clone of an earlier bio-human. Kogonada takes a fairly common dramatic idea -- how little we actually know about our loved ones -- and weds it to a post-human scenario. 

Much of the second half of After Yang consists of Jake rifling through Yang's memory banks, which contain brief ten-second recordings of the android's daily life. It's here that Kogonada's visual imagination really fails him. The viewing menu is shown as an artificial skyscape with star-points to click on, and while I certainly have no unique insight into how computers will look in the future, this rendering seems at the same time too abstruse and overly literal. Our disconnected memories are fleeting points of light in a darkened cosmos, a kind of AI representation of nonlinear, Deleuzian subjectivity. But in providing the viewer with a comprehensible structure for post-human recall, Kogonada eliminates much of the mystery that Yang's existence could have implied. (Compare this with the truly disorienting time-travel montages in Resnais' Je t'aime, je t'aime.) 

If the purpose of After Yang is to suggest that AI beings are not so different than us, there might've been a way to convey this without reducing all subjects, human and non-human, into quietly humming little motherboards. The aspects of the film that imply more complicated emotions, like the tension between Jake and Kyra, or Mika's confusion over her racial identity, aren't really explored in any depth. At the same time, After Yang's melancholy tone informs us that we are not really supposed to feel that we're in the company of hollow men. Instead of demanding that we see Yang as profoundly human despite his industrial origins, Kogonada conjures a milieu that suggests that all subject in our midst are little more than design elements. Like the tennis balls used on-set to show were a CGI figure will be added in post-production, these characters occupy spaces where life (or something like it) was meant to appear.