“What the caterpillar calls the end, the rest of the world calls a butterfly.”
The quote is attributed to Lao Tzu. The figure referencing it is Yang (Justin H. Min), an android programmed to know it as part of a vast mosaic of Chinese history and culture he is meant to impart. And it comes about in a conversation that he has with Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith), a mother-figure, friend, but also for all intents and purposes, his owner, curious about his thoughts on existence. She asks if he believes that and his pensiveness seems to take her aback. What she doesn’t know is he is much closer to that end as he envisions than she ever thought.
The titular figure of After Yang, the transcendent sophomore feature from video essayist-turned filmmaker Kogonada, “dies” relatively early in -at the end of the opening credits in fact. In this world of the indeterminate future, he was a robot teenager bought by Kyra and Jake (Colin Farrell) to keep company for their adopted daughter Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) and foster a connection to her Chinese heritage. She was especially close to him, and so when he becomes unresponsive all of a sudden it is immensely troubling for her, a girl who already feels dejected and alone.
Everyone seems to be alone really, the world that Kogonada creates is a very empty one, we see only slivers of it. Jake and Kyra’s lush modernist house, an underground highway, a scrappy workshop, and a pristine museum make up the primary settings with an occasional vague establishing shot that suggests civilization but never explores it. The family have one somewhat obtrusive neighbour but otherwise no real friends to speak of. Their existence is defined by limited connection between people. They are enshrouded in a quiet dystopia disguised in contentment and a suspicious serenity, idyllic but vacant -and nobody seems particularly happy. It feels like the world on the margins of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Something crucial in humanity is missing and Yang may have been the one to most understand that.
As Jake endeavours to ascertain what is wrong with Yang, if it is possible to resuscitate him, and what is to be done if he can’t, he finds himself captivated by the labyrinth of Yang’s memories, far more extensive and personal than in a typical android. In among the moments he retained from each day is a mystery concerning a woman (Haley Lu Richardson) he seemed to have been enamoured with. And there’s apparent significance Yang attaches to conversations with each of the family members about vital human themes: belonging with Mika, who is teased by her peers for not having “real parents”, sensation with Jake, whom he envies the ability to experience ordinary things more profoundly than he can conceptualize, and lastly mortality with Kyra, as alluded to earlier, that betrays a certain trepidation about his own impermanence. It all points to an individual with a great deal of interest in humanity, but then as another character exclaims when this is posited, “we always assume that other beings would want to be human -what’s so great about being human?” Are such traits as Yang expresses innately human, are they merely sentient? Is there a difference? What is clear is that Yang reaches for something beyond himself, and as layers of his history are more revealed it becomes apparent that he has grasped it. His life is ultimately full and meaningful in a way so many others in this film aren’t. With luck, it can be a compass for the rest.
Min is really good in this quiet, solemn yearning -the whole cast is. Farrell and Turner-Smith deliver astoundingly, Tjandrawidjaja is about as lovable a kid as you can get. But it’s Kogonada’s direction, how he arranges them in the camera and uses them that is the real star. He cultivates a glorious, moody atmosphere that can still contain a level of affable fun -mostly articulated through dialogue, but also a noteworthy opening sequence that sees the four leads dancing together for a kind of online game that is intercut with other families against green screens, and has the rhythm and a semblance of the joy of the opening to Peacemaker. It comes strategically at the end of a montage of tranquil moments for this beautiful family, and acts as a good buffer for the pervasive sadness of the rest of the film. Kogonada, who also edited the picture, is highly attuned to expressing his ideas visually. Though the dialogue is magnificent and thoughtful, he likes to set some scenes without it, to hone in on something abstract or the contemplation of an actor; he’ll cast an evocative light, limit the scope of view, and simply let his characters sit quietly, as he does at the end -apt of a filmmaker who took his professional name from the writing partner of Yasujir
ō
Ozu. These purely visual meditations are aided greatly in their profundity, in their grand sense of weight by the beautiful ethereal music of Ryuichi Sakamoto (with Aska Matsumiya) which realizes in exquisite terms the vastness of Kogonada’s themes –an early contender for best score of the year.Likewise enthralling are the little curiosities, such as the repetition of certain sequences in Yang’s memories –a phrase or linguistic detail that is played again but from another angle Bergman-like, creating this image of presumably what Yang specifically latches onto in his everyday exchanges, where he extracts meaning. Repetitive images that seem to cross Jake’s mind as he tries to unravel Yang’s mysteries act as a contrast of his own mind to his “son’s” memory bank. Once again that idea of connection comes back as Jake is posthumously building a relationship with Yang through exploring the nuances of his existence. He and Kyra let on little how they feel about his ‘death’, Yang was after all a product on some level. But there’s an impact left palpably still -he touched their lives in an important way, in a familial way that got right to their hearts, and it has them considering him in a new light. Kogonada is careful to keep Yang framed between levels of sentience -he may show him on a slab but doesn’t visualize the inner workings of his synapses. He is on some plane between worlds, and the detail with which we see him forget his artificiality is one in a line of extremely provoking choices.
Another thing that Yang questions is why he is Chinese. Though it’s not as heavily discussed, race plays a significant and compelling role here. It’s no accident for instance that the films’ endearing family unit is multiracial. The whole purpose of bringing Yang into the family was to provide Mika a stronger sense of her ethnic heritage -it’s very important for Jake and Kyra as we see in the various Chinese motifs and symbols and paraphernalia that decorate their home. Yet there’s something unsettling in the idea of Yang’s race being grafted onto him, that though he is made to look Chinese and have an encyclopedic knowledge of all things China, he may well have been constructed for those purposes by a corporation that has no ties to that culture. It may be a borderless world he occupies, the film never confirms a specific nation and the leads have Irish, English, and American accents, but it’s a particularly strong aspect of Yang’s identity he simply must examine. And it asks us to consider the ways race is applied or fetishized even in a world yearning to be more globalist and progressive.
Clearly though, Yang exceeded whatever purpose he was built for. Watching the movie, I was as hopeful that he could come back as I was certain he wouldn’t. Kogonada opens on a scene of Yang posing the family for a picture, nearly forgetting despite their urging to join in before the timer is up. For him it’s a moment to savor, but he is a part of it too -their appeals on a loop in his memory confirming he understands that. After Yang there will perhaps be more pictures of Jake, Kyra, and Mika, but it can be surmised that the imprint of his soul won’t have departed them.
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