Columbus (Kogonada, 2017)

Haley Lu Richardson and John Cho in Columbus

Cast: John Cho, Haley Lu Richardson, Parker Posey, Michelle Forbes, Rory Culkin. Screenplay: Kogonada. Cinematography: Elisha Christian. Production design: Diana Rice. Film editing: Kogonada. Music: Hammock.

Kogonada's debut feature, Columbus, had a lot of critics scrounging for superlatives, one of them being a comparison to the films of the master director Yasujiro Ozu. Which is apt, considering that Kogonada is a pseudonym -- his birth name is a slyly guarded secret -- derived from that of Ozu's co-screenwriter, Kogo Noda. But the filmmaker that Columbus most reminded me of was Éric Rohmer, whose films, like Claire's Knee (1970) and My Night at Maud's (1969), typically center on a man and a woman talking. Sometimes sex is involved, but usually only as one of the things they talk about. The man in Columbus is Jin (John Cho), a Korean in early middle age who works as a translator of books in English. The woman is Cassandra, called Casey (Haley Lu Richardson), not long out of high school and working in a library until she decides on a course for her life. They meet in the small city of Columbus, Indiana, which is chiefly famous for the many buildings -- churches, banks, schools, and so on -- designed by famous architects like the Saarinens, I.M. Pei, Cesar Pelli, and others. Jin is in Columbus because his father, an architect, went there to give a lecture but suffered a stroke and is comatose in the hospital. Casey is there because she grew up in Columbus and hasn't yet decided to leave because her mother (Michelle Forbes) is a recovering drug addict. Jin is estranged from his father but bound against his will by Korean family tradition to stay near to him. Casey would like to leave Columbus and have a career, but she fears what may happen to her mother if she does. They're both single, though Jin has a longstanding crush on his father's assistant, Eleanor (Parker Posey), who accompanied his father to Columbus and remains there after his stroke. Casey is carrying on a flirtation with Gabriel (Rory Culkin), a co-worker at the library who's more interested in her than she is in him. Jin and Casey meet, he bums a cigarette from her -- there's an awful lot of smoking in the film, a reason why the film echoes French movies for me -- and they start to talk. Over the next few days in Columbus they will talk about architecture as they wander through some of the city's landmark buildings, and they will talk about life, family, culture, and so on. In a more conventional film, the talk would lead to romance, and there is a kind of spark between Jin and Casey, but Kogonada isn't interested in making a conventional film. Instead, he leaves us to ponder the substance of the talk, the beauty and function of architecture, and the nature of relationships. Which makes Columbus sound more abstract than it is: Cho, Richardson, and the rest of the cast create people that are as real and individual as the settings through which they wander.