Social media platforms are the future of communication. VineIf you decide to make a comeback, you should do so quickly and immediately. “After Yang.” Without exactly trying, South Korean–born American filmmaker Kogonada’s second feature offers a powerful, almost undeniable showcase for the narrative and emotional merits of extreme short-form video content.
The story of a family whose robotic servant and caretaker malfunctions, a delicately futuristic tale. “After Yang”This article examines how memory can convey meaning. It is often possible to see the same thing from a different perspective than the original experience. Colin Farrell, Justin H. Min, and Haley Lu Richardson provide different, equally compelling angles from which to view connections in human lives we may not realize are tenuous at best until they’re unable to be reconnected.
Farrell plays Jake, a purveyor of the analog pleasures of tea in a world that’s become so advanced that digital conveniences have become inextricably baked into daily existence. The greatest of these conveniences is “technosapiens,” and in Jake’s home, he and his wife Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith) purchased the robot Yang (Min, “The Umbrella Academy”(Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) to offer a cultural foundation for Mika, their adopted Chinese daughter. “iCarly”) as she grows up in a home otherwise absent of biologically native influence.
Jake attempts repair Yang’s machine after it suddenly malfunctions. However, he quickly realizes that he bought the techsapien secondhand. Mika becomes increasingly anxious about Mika’s absence and begins to panic.
Russ Coster, a secondhand repairman, was hired. “The Walking Dead”Through George, Jake meets Cleo (Sarita Chudhury), the curator at a museum focusing on technosapiens. She explains to Jake that Yang contains technology not intended to spy on his owners (as Russ conspiratorially believed), but to capture short snapshots of what an AI would consider to be important. “memory.” Unlocking these clips from Yang’s memory banks, Jake soon finds himself consumed by the machine’s poetic aptitude for capturing the life and experiences of his family.
After Ada Richardson, a young woman, appears in Jake’s memories repeatedly, Jake sets out to uncover Yang’s secret history. This will allow him to reveal some important and subtle truths about his family relationships.
Based on the story “Saying Goodbye To Yang” by Alexander Weinstein, Kogonada’s film examines some of the same ideas as many other films about artificial intelligence, from “A.I.”To “Her,”It is closer to Jonze than Spielberg in terms of its light scifi touch, its more meditative, emotional and technological quandaries. An extension of the digital assistants that navigate our vehicles, answer questions on our phones or play music when summoned, Yang becomes the mirror and connective tissue between this family’s experiences and its collective memory, and the clips in his memory form a collage that forces Jake, and eventually Kyra, to realize they’ve been existing instead of living.
That the clips each run just a few seconds, and frequently start or end after the meat of an exchange that must be more carefully recalled, makes them more powerful than if they were first-person home movies by an omniscient technology; in a technologically believable and still somehow gorgeously poetic way, Kogonada creates a virtual universe in Yang’s memory that reveals Jake to himself while cataloguing tiny vignettes whose importance no one, perhaps least of all Yang, quite understood. Bringing Jake’s sleuthing into focus is the discovery he eventually makes about Yang’s existence, which won’t be spoiled here but speaks to a life lived more attentively than by the family to which he was assigned, whether or not it was always done intentionally, as that mirror reflects truths that demand deeper self-examination.
Even a casual search for more detail about Weinstein’s source material suggests a more significant sociocultural context that Kogonada excised for the sake of his own more contemplative narrative, which proves to be a deficiency only inasmuch as the relationship between Farrell and Turner-Smith as spouses raising a Chinese-born daughter prompts questions from an invested audience that never get answered.
Both they and Min as Yang are so good and understated that you want to know more about them, their lives and their experiences, but the film looks at their world more existentially than experientially — which is perhaps the point: There has to be a balance between the interior world of the heart and mind, and the practicalities and permanence of physical interaction, and Yang’s departure from their daily dynamic throws them out of whack.
A library of video essays covering everyone from Wes Anderson, Hirokazu Core-eda and more are his accomplishments. He also has another narrative project. “Pachinko,”Kogonada is also scheduled to release his feature in 2022 via Apple TV+. He has already found his own balance between his impressionistic explorations and his world-building as an author. Whether or not you’ve seen his 2017 feature debut “Columbus,” “After Yang”It is a truly groundbreaking film. A film that can incite the feverish excitement for discovery in moviegoers eager to see visions (and visionaries). The film’s early presentation at festivals such as Sundance and Cannes gives it an even more pregnant feeling of promise.
The control and confidence of its form, paired with an emotionality that is at once effortless and irresistibly powerful, makes the film feel to the audience the way those pointed and yet somehow ephemeral clips in Yang’s memory feel to Jake. In preying on a sensation that’s only indirectly remembered, the impact it makes becomes unforgettable.
“After Yang”March 2022: Opening in US Theaters