Colum­bus

The city of Colum­bus, Indi­ana is only home to around 45,000 res­i­dents, but since the mid-1950s it has become a strange Promised Land for archi­tec­ture enthu­si­asts. Fea­tur­ing some fine exam­ples of ear­ly Mod­ernist pub­lic spaces, it makes for a beguil­ing set­ting in video essay­ist Kogonada’s debut feature.

Although best known for his explo­rations of oth­er direc­tors’ work, here Kog­o­na­da opts to tell an orig­i­nal sto­ry. John Cho plays Jin, a Kore­an-Amer­i­can trans­la­tor who reluc­tant­ly trav­els to the tit­u­lar town after his estranged archi­tect father falls ill dur­ing a lec­ture tour. Bored and frus­trat­ed by his unsched­uled pit-stop, he befriends the direc­tion­less library assis­tant Casey (Haley Lu Richard­son), who is torn between leav­ing home and pur­su­ing her pas­sion for archi­tec­ture, or stay­ing behind to care for her mother.

While this premise alone is a lit­tle old hat, there is some­thing decid­ed­ly earnest about Kogonada’s film. The sleepy town is bathed in warm sun­light and then cool down­pours as time drags on, reveal­ing the city as the still point of the turn­ing uni­verse for Jin and Casey. Their friend­ship is grad­ual but ten­der, imbued with long, reflec­tive silences and awk­ward jokes that push the lim­its of their recent acquain­tance – one unex­pect­ed high­light sees Jin attempt, in a round­about way, to ask if Casey’s moth­er is a for­mer drug addict.

It’s pleas­ing to see Cho – who for so long has been cast in under­writ­ten roles – giv­en a chance to shine. He plays Jin with pal­pa­ble world-weari­ness, but also an endear­ing inel­e­gance that allows you to believe he’s a real per­son. Haley Lu Richard­son as Casey is equal­ly well cast, bring­ing a bright spark of ener­gy to the role and pro­vid­ing the per­fect foil to the straight-laced Jin. As stylised as the build­ings are around them, there’s a sense than Jin and Casey come from a very real place, and it’s easy to empathise with their per­son­al strug­gles – yet they sub­vert the cin­e­mat­ic odd cou­ple trope by being so refresh­ing­ly nor­mal, even in their differences.

Giv­en Kogonada’s back­ground as a film aca­d­e­m­ic and video essay­ist, it’s no sur­prise that the real strength of Colum­bus comes from its visu­als. The film is filled with shots that cap­ture beau­ty and bru­tal­i­ty in the town’s famous con­struc­tion, and one par­tic­u­lar­ly com­pelling scene between Jin and his father’s assis­tant, Eleanor (a mys­te­ri­ous and ele­gant Park­er Posey), is framed entire­ly with­in two mir­rors in a hotel room. A sense of being teth­ered to a loca­tion by a sense of duty trans­lates into a slow pace, with much of the film’s dri­ving action tak­ing place in the final 20 min­utes or so. This is slight­ly jar­ring giv­en the film’s min­i­mal­ist aesthetic.

Colum­bus feels like a love let­ter to this unique locale, but not so much as to iso­late view­ers unfa­mil­iar with the loca­tion – rather, Kog­o­na­da seems inter­est­ed in the details of what con­nects peo­ple to places. Casey falls into the role of Jin’s per­son­al tour guide as the pair mean­der between the town’s con­struc­tion curiosi­ties, com­par­ing notes on fraught parental rela­tion­ships and trad­ing archi­tec­ture anec­dotes. For cap­tur­ing a rare sort of inti­ma­cy on screen, Kog­o­na­da has proven him­self one to watch.