Columbus (2017)
Directed by Kogonada
When a renowned architecture scholar falls suddenly ill during a speaking tour, his son Jin finds himself stranded in Columbus, Indiana - a small Midwestern city celebrated for its many significant modernist buildings. Jin strikes up a friendship with Casey, a young architecture enthusiast who works at the local library.
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Ostensibly a romantic drama in the vein of Richard Linklater’s “Before” trilogy and Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation,” “Columbus” joins together a pair of seemingly different people — both with troubles to spare — and delights in them, well, delighting in each other.
What grows between them isn't romantic; their friendship echoing Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation in form and substance.
The film is not unlike a small-town rewriting of Lost In Translation, at a stretch, but without the facetiousness, without the strident cultural tourism, without the sentiment straining beneath the surface.
The pair bond in a way that’s intimate but non-sexual, rather like – in a muted, non-comic manner – the relationship between the Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson characters in Lost in Translation.
Imagine Lost In Translation set in a much sleepier metropolis than Tokyo.
This is one impressive feature debut by the South Korean immigrant Kogonada, who chose that name for himself, a homage to the moniker of Ozu’s Tokyo Story scenarist, Kogo Noda.
The name is a film-nerd nod to the writer of some of the greatest classics made by the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, such as Tokyo Story and An Autumn Afternoon .
Kogonada, who wrote the script and edited his film with an eye to the classic film symmetry of Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story, also follows another character.
The name is a film-nerd nod to the writer of some of the greatest classics made by the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, such as Tokyo Story and An Autumn Afternoon .
In this short time, Jin and Casey take only baby steps toward a relationship, in a manner that recalls Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise.
This is not Before Sunrise : no romance blooms between Jin and Casey during their Socratic back and forth.
Though it might feel like Linklater’s Before Sunset , the story is very turbulent.
It’s a light plot that’s window dressing for a hypnotic meditation on time, responsibility, and art, reminiscent of Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation and Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy .
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Instead, it has more in common with works about subtle human emotion that just happen to pay extremely close attention to their built environments: films like Luca Guadagnino’s 2002 I Am Love, which gazed upon Milan’s Villa Necchi Campiglio ; Antonioni’s industrial love letter Red Desert (1965); or Brian de Palma’s Body Double (1984).
Instead, it has more in common with works about subtle human emotion that just happen to pay extremely close attention to their built environments: films like Luca Guadagnino’s 2002 I Am Love, which gazed upon Milan’s Villa Necchi Campiglio ; Antonioni’s industrial love letter Red Desert (1965); or Brian de Palma’s Body Double (1984).
Hitchcock made great play with houses, of course, with the metaphorical mansion of Psycho (1960), the perspective tricks of Rear Window (1954), and the bonkers Vandamm House of North by Northwest (1959).
Hitchcock made great play with houses, of course, with the metaphorical mansion of Psycho (1960), the perspective tricks of Rear Window (1954), and the bonkers Vandamm House of North by Northwest (1959).
Hitchcock made great play with houses, of course, with the metaphorical mansion of Psycho (1960), the perspective tricks of Rear Window (1954), and the bonkers Vandamm House of North by Northwest (1959).
There’s a touch of Richard Linklater, he of the ambulatory two-handers, and also of Jem Cohen, whose Museum Hours asked similar questions about our relationship to art and history, in these digressive discussions.
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Instead, it has more in common with works about subtle human emotion that just happen to pay extremely close attention to their built environments: films like Luca Guadagnino’s 2002 I Am Love, which gazed upon Milan’s Villa Necchi Campiglio ; Antonioni’s industrial love letter Red Desert (1965); or Brian de Palma’s Body Double (1984).
Columbus finds the essayist having graduated to filmmaking proper, though little about this robust indie drama, part Sixties Antonioni and part Garden State, suggests the work of a man who cuts together sizzle reels for a living.
Columbus is a film in the tradition of Garden State, one in a long line of movies about a sad dude who has to stop his life and fly to the middle of America somewhere when one of his parents dies or falls ill (didn’t John Krasinski make one of these recently?