Columbus (2017)

Casey (Haley Lu Richardson), lives in Columbus, Indiana, with her mother. She works at a local library, and knows just about everything concerning the town’s assortment of modernist architecture. Exceptional in her brightness, she has options ahead of her: east coast colleges would accept her in an instant, a New York architectural firm have hinted at a job offer. But she can’t leave. She’s become a parental figure for her mother, whose life collapsed after a bad relationship.

Over a cigarette, she meets Jin (John Cho), a translator drawn into town because his father, a professor in architecture, was recently hospitalised. They’re at cross-purposes, but they get on well. And that is, for the most part, the film: two intelligent people talking about their lives.

This conceit, reminiscent of Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy (1995-2013), rests on this pair of performances, and a fine script in which to house them. Richardson has a warm presence, and, as time elapses, it’s difficult not to be moved by her resilient sense of kindness. Cho, whose charm is profound, has hard-shell moments tinged with reluctance, all of this visible on his brilliant, weary, weathered face. (There are gentle turns by Parker Posey, as Jin’s father’s assistant, and Rory Culkin as Casey’s librarian colleague, whose argument of ‘interest vs attention span’ runs as something like a topic sentence for the movie.)

If beats in the film’s writing appear overly knowing, they are more than compensated for by a scene in which the pair discuss the layout of a modernist bank. Casey waxes about its form in too exact a way, and Jin waves at her, asking, “Who are you?” She replies that she’s not only interested in the building, but that it moves her. What does she find moving? She answers this question, but Kogonada cuts the sound, to another of Hammock’s pleasing cues, and then moves along. Concealment, just when you expect confession. Marvellous.

And, my word, these frames! Indebted to Yasujiro Ozu, and, I think, to Edward Yang (the distance between the character and the camera, the frames within the frame, the training in on reflections), Kogonada’s frames are beautiful, and express in precise terms an emotional note worth hitting. There is — like in the buildings Casey adores — symmetry, asymmetry, an exacting appreciation of space, and, wit in these images. The editing (also by Kogonada) is abrupt, and the montages of establishing shots (a wonderful Ozu touch) repeat over the course of the picture, each time slightly changed, partially reconfigured: the same places, literally, in a different light. Small places contain infinite variety.

Columbus is a formalist’s dream, even if it has instances in which its artfulness is over-studied, or a stray metaphor which too neatly ensconces a narrative point. These are at least felicitous errors. Columbus is a film I’ll return to again and again, for how it takes such delight in people’s pleasures, and creates a new one of its own.