After Yang speaks in a hush, but if you lean in to listen you’ll pick up on a film of rare wisdom and beauty.
Set in a near future that’s softly detailed (both fashion and furniture seem to have trended toward warm colors and comfortable materials), the movie centers on a family of three … or maybe four. Jake (Colin Farrell) and Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith) are the adoptive parents of little Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja). To help her connect with her Chinese heritage, which neither of them share, they purchased a “techno sapien” when Mika was an infant. An android engineered to function as an older brother of sorts, Yang (Justin H. Min) appears Chinese and knows everything there is to know about Chinese history and culture.
Although even Mika recognizes that Yang is not human, he’s very much a part of the family. The film’s delightful opening-credits sequence features the four of them participating in some sort of live, communal dance game, in which they perform a choreographed routine in order to win points, competing against other families out in cyberspace. (When the camera cuts to these competitors, some of whom will show up as supporting characters later, each family gets its own bold, color-block background, which stands in sharp contrast to the film’s otherwise muted tones.)
After the game, Yang unexpectedly shuts down and can’t be rebooted. The family falls into disarray, with Mika distraught and acting out at school and Jake and Kyra passively aggressively negotiating who should pick up most of the parental slack. Desperate to have Yang repaired, even though the warranty has expired and most people would have him “recycled” for a new model, Jake takes him to an underground techno-sapien fixer. There it’s discovered that an undisclosed feature has allowed Yang to make brief recordings—no more than three or four seconds at a time—capturing not only moments from his days with Jake, Kyra, and Mika, but also from those with the family he was a part of before Jake found him on a second-hand market.
Writer-director Kogonada, adapting a short story by Alexander Weinstein, could have taken this setup in various directions, delivering a sci-fi adventure (think Steven Spielberg’s A.I Artificial Intelligence) or thriller (Alex Garland’s Ex Machina). Yet even as After Yang shares much with those two films, it is far more subdued, sedate, and expressly philosophical. (This should not be surprising to anyone who has seen Kogonada’s excellent debut, Columbus, a picture of quiet conversations and carefully composed architecture.) In the end, After Yang is less interested in excitedly speculating on the inner life of its title character than it is interested in what we homo sapiens do with the lives we’ve been given.
Consider a flashback scene in which Jake and Yang discuss tea. (Jake runs an artisanal tea shop and spends much time carefully steeping varieties in the family kitchen.) Yang asks Jake what it is about tea that so fascinates him—the history, the taste, or maybe just the leaves floating delicately in the hot water, which is one of the film’s recurring, mesmerizing images. Jake pauses, for the first time it seems, to actually think about why tea means so much to him. (For cinephiles, he references the 2007 documentary All in this Tea and does an impersonation of Werner Herzog, who appears in the doc.) At the end of the scene, Jake and Yang end up sharing a cup, but again, it’s as much about Jake’s dawning consciousness—his newfound awareness of the world around him—as Yang’s.
There is something particularly intriguing happening with the sound in this scene. As Jake talks, certain phrases are replayed, like an echo, on the soundtrack. Sometimes we also see Jake repeating the phrase, with a different intonation. It’s not certain what’s going on here, but it may be that Kogonada (who also served as the film’s editor) is merging Jake’s own recollections of this moment with the recorded fragments of it he has watched via Yang’s “memory bank”—a confluence of biased recall and the historical record. In any case, the sequence creatively combines past and present in a way that powerfully captures a moment of epiphany (while also speaking to the nostalgic power of a good cup of tea).
It’s worth noting how Kogonada visually presents Yang’s memories. To access them, Jake wears a pair of glasses, through which each memory appears as a pin of light in a vast, dark space. The camera zooms in from one to the other, before we eventually settle into a montage of briefly captured images: Jake, Kyra, and Mika posing for a family photo, beckoning Yang to join them; Yang looking at himself in a mirror; the deep red leaves of a Japanese maple tree in the family’s courtyard; and, mysteriously, a few seconds of a strange young woman (Haley Lu Richardson, of Columbus) at a nightclub, singing along to the existentially yearning lyrics coming from the unseen stage: “I wanna be…” (The song itself is Mitski’s cover of “Glide,” originally featured in the 2001 film All About Lily Chou-Chou.) One of Yang’s flitting memories—of cherry blossoms floating in the air—reminded me of another recent movie about taking the time to notice the everyday wonders around us: Pixar’s Soul, which features an epiphanic moment involving fluttering whirlybird maple seeds.
Like those memories, every moment in After Yang is beautiful in its own way. And yet they all work together to form a coherent whole, particularly as Jake comes to realize that many of those snippets Yang captured managed to slip by him. After Yang, however, isn’t out to shame or warn us—about our increasing release on technology, about our poor parenting, or about our fear of diversity rather than our embrace of it. The film is too gentle for that. Rather, After Yang tenderly suggests that life is a mystery worth savoring, three seconds at a time.
(3/4/2022)
