Architecture of attraction flourishes in Indiana city
With its calm, careful attention to architectural detail and a fascination with the spaces between and around its characters, “Columbus” is a lovely feature debut from the writer-director who goes by the name Kogonada. It stars John Cho and Haley Lu Richardson in two of the year’s subtlest and truest performances.
The film’s title refers to the Indiana city (population just under 47,000, and the birthplace of U.S. Vice President Mike Pence) boasting a considerable array of buildings, ranging from a bank branch to a house of worship, designed by a gallery of major architects, including I.M. Pei, Cesar Pelli, Eero Saarinen and Harry Weese. Kogonada luxuriates in the surroundings created by these masters of the built environment. But “Columbus” transcends the realm of a conventional architectural tour. The people on screen matter too.
Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunrise/Sunset/ Midnight” trilogy exerts a strong influence here. In his work as a video essayist, Kogonada has paid tribute to Linklater. (Much of his richly provocative work can be found on his website.) As in “Before Sunrise,” two strangers meet by chance, though in “Columbus” their respective stories are well underway before the meeting takes place.
Cho plays Jin, the translator son of a renowned architect. In the opening scene, in which the key moment remains just offcamera, the architect collapses and soon falls into a coma. His son arrives from Seoul with an uncertain timeline and a conflicted, privately anguished sense of what to wish for regarding his estranged father’s recovery.
Meantime we’re introduced to Casey (Richardson), a recent high school graduate and Columbus resident who works in a local library. (Rory Culkin plays her passive-aggressively smitten co-worker.) Casey has foregone any collegiate or travel plans in her role as unofficial caretaker for her recovering addict mother (Michelle Forbes).
Casey’s an untrained but highly perceptive expert regarding local architecture. When she meets Jin, the groundwork is laid in a shrewdly sustained walk-and-talk exchange with one character on one side of a fence and the other on the other. “Columbus” charts these intersecting lines in a series of conversations, precise but flowing, in the Linklater vein.
As Jin puzzles through his relationship with his father, Casey, similarly, must sort out her obligation to her mother. Jin is skeptical, even disdainful, of his father’s lifelong devotion to his work. “That architecture has the power to heal — that’s the fantasy architects like to tell themselves,” he says to Casey. His words, however, are questioned by nearly every frame of “Columbus.”
The movie is beautiful without wasting its time on cliched beauty. Kogonada, who edited as well as wrote and directed, collaborates intuitively with cinematographer Elisha Christian, who’s as good with faces as he is with sharp, modernist edges etched in concrete.
Above all, Cho and Richardson are wonderful. Kogonada acknowledges their characters’ mutual attraction, as well as their considerable age difference, while steering the somewhat elliptical narrative away from predictable story beats.
The two big things in Columbus, Casey wryly informs Jin, are “meth and modernism.” The two big things in “Columbus” are Cho and Richardson, whose slow-building relationship is defined, in ways both obvious and mysterious, by the buildings all around them.