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What is memory, exactly? We think we know, but do we really? Are memories the product of living in the moment, or can we have them even when we’ve failed to be mindful of whatever present we happen to find ourselves in—and might that even make them more potent, like roadside signs we fail to clock as we drive by, only to catch just in time in the rear-view mirror?
Kogonada’s gorgeous and wistful film After Yang doesn’t answer any of those questions. Maybe it doesn’t even ask them. But it has the strange effect of being both soothing and energizing: at the end, you may feel you’ve just seen a movie that somehow holds elusive answers to some of the bigger questions in life, even though nothing is spelled out too broadly. This film has a hushed, lullaby quality. There is nothing like it, certainly not in the current film landscape, and even though there have been movies about the possible feelings of artificially intelligent beings before—even Steven Spielberg made one—this one feels meditative and fresh. It’s a film to watch when you’re feeling unsettled about things—which may be most of the time these days.
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Colin Farrell plays a father, Jake, living in an unspecified future era, in a society of gleaming Emerald City-like domes and skyscrapers that also appears to have left some room for nature, in the form of verdant forests. Jake and his wife, Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith), have a young daughter, Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja), who is not their biological child. At the time of her birth, they welcomed a fourth member of the family, a “technosapien” named Yang, an android with skin and bones but whose thoughts and feelings are ostensibly pure programming. (He’s played, with a blend of gentle humor and graveness, by Justin H. Min.) Jake and Kyra—who seem to be living off one income, Kyra’s, as Jake runs a tea shop that draws very few customers—bought Yang second-hand, as a means of connecting their daughter with her Chinese…
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Source : time
