There are films that swell in orchestral waves, others that grind like scuzzy metal, and still others that burble like melodic pop, but “Columbus,” the first feature film from Korean-American video essay pioneer Kogonada, chimes like a bell: simple, sustained and thrillingly pure. A gentle but sharply defined story, brimming with grace, compassion and performances of perfect naturalism, it is unashamedly intellectual yet deeply human. In fact, it does such a quietly grand job of relating the arcane appreciation of modernist architecture to the mysterious workings of interpersonal relationships, that it exposes the strangeness of ever thinking that intellectual investigation would be anything but the most emotive and human of endeavors. It is the film’s magic to make what is often chilly feel so envelopingly warm, and in the crisp parallels and strict right angles of an Eero Saarinen building, to describe the embracing curve of an entirely organic connection between two people, embarking on the risky construction project that is a new friendship.
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Jin and Casey are two characters sketched in truthful, clean lines by Kogonada’s discursive, never didactic script but made tangibly real by two absolutely revelatory performances. John Cho, playing notes that his biggest roles to date in the “Star Trek” and “Harold and Kumar” movies could scarcely hint at, plays Jin, the son of a famous architect of the modernist school, who flies in from Seoul to Columbus, Indiana when his benignly estranged father takes ill while touring the city’s proud architectural heritage. Haley Lu Richardson, a star in steep ascendant after her turns in “The Edge of Seventeen” and “Split,” plays Casey, a recent high-school graduate and Columbus resident, whose apparent directionlessness in comparison to her college-bound peers is no reflection on her bristling intelligence, but a choice: she is staying at home to care for her mother, who’s recovering from drug addiction. The two meet casually, they visit buildings and talk about their designers — Deborah Berke‘s Irwin Union Bank, Eliel Saarinen‘s church, his son Eero Saarinen‘s gorgeous “Miller House” (where the film begins and ends). They share secrets, the way it’s easy to do with a stranger who doesn’t really care, and then they start to care. The precision with which this unusual relationship is drawn, and the way it threatens to turn into something more obvious and weirdly less precious, like a love affair, is breathtaking, and it builds to an edifice that, like the elder Saarinen’s church, is asymmetric but in harmonious balance.
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In orbit around this central connection are three other excellent performances, from Parker Posey as a longtime family friend and fervent acolyte of Jin’s father; Michelle Forbes as Casey’s troubled but loving mother; and Rory Culkin as the librarian with whom Casey works part-time and trades long, erudite conversations — including a fascinating digression on the myth of the declining attention span. All this inherently academic speechifying should be irritatingly sophomoric and lifeless, but it’s oxygenated by colloquial humor, and by Richardson’s quicksilver smile that can change the mood of a whole dialogue from serious to merry in an instant. There is not one false note struck between any of the five principals, and their interplay becomes as vital and engaging as any melodrama, without ever being in the slightest melodramatic.
It’s counterintuitive, maybe, to talk so much about the story and performance here, but these are the surprising elements. Anyone who has seen one of Kogonada’s thoughtful, meditative supercuts — maybe the one on Robert Bresson‘s fascination with hands or the essay on Stanley Kubrick‘s use of one-point perspective/symmetry — will expect the beauty of DP Elisha Christian‘s shotmaking, the striking formalist frames, the clever compositions, the elegant edits. But if the film’s pristine form is to be expected, it is still exceptional. And perhaps the editing most of all: exemplified in one gorgeous triptych where one character prepares to take a shower, another is shown showering in a different location, before we cut to a third toweling off, Kogonada, who edited the film himself, strings these polished, gleaming shots together so they’re distinct but linked, like beads on a rosary. Aside from everything else, this is a stunningly assured debut in terms of craft, and it gives heartening proof that students of cinema, for such Kogonada’s prior work confirms him to be, can occasionally turn master, right out of the gate.
Columbus, Indiana has a recent claim to fame/infamy other than its architecture: it is the birthplace of the current Vice President. “Columbus,” however, certainly on the surface, is almost willfully apolitical. The films themes are the consolations of art, the nature of filial duty, the paradoxical push-pull between permanence and ephemerality, and the way we are affected by the built structures that surround us. But on another level it has almost painful relevance in these anti-intellectual, isolationist times: the suggestion that expertise can be important or that the deepest connection is possible despite culturally disparate backgrounds, starts to feel less like rarefied theorizing and more like a radical act of quiet, gracious defiance.
This is a film about how to connect to each other through art, and how to live inside our connected lives as though they were planned structures, designed with the intention to unite, inspire, heal and comfort. Its greatest achievement, though, is that Kogonada’s film breathes life and humanity into these elusive abstract concepts, and makes you look at the hard edges of the world a little differently afterward. The relationships we build might sigh and creak under external pressures, but they are as fundamental to the landscapes of our psyches as buildings. And like buildings, they differ in nature — they can be highway gas stations you stop in once, never to return, or they can be the cathedrals of all you hold most sacred — but they are the architecture of our lives. [A]