Thursday 24 August 2023

Columbus (2017 Kogonada & scr, ed)

A young, intelligent student of architecture feels she cannot leave her home town as her mother is a reformed meth addict. She meets the son of an architectural professor, who's there to visit his ailing dad in hospital, and they form a bond. A slow character study that seems to have much in common with Lost In Translation. Actually, it's not that slow. It's measured. And formally constructed.

John Cho (Star Trek as Sulu, Grandma), Hayley Lu Richardson (Five Feet Apart, The White Lotus, Support the Girls, The Edge of Seventeen), Parker Posey (Irrational Man, Hemingway and Gellhorn), Michelle Forbes, Rory Culkin (Lymelife).

Interesting that when she tells Cho why she really likes the former bank, we don't hear her explanation - it's not what she says but that she's opening up to him. Liked the hotel room scene in which Cho propositions Posey - it's not only one long take but the camera is stationary. Some of the architecture is weird indeed, but always interesting. Use of the width of the screen good too. And like the way we don't know what's going on. For example, we don't know what the relationship between Richardson and Forbes is. We think Cho's staying in a hotel, but there's no other guests or staff until much later on. Sometimes we're not even sure where we are, but it all pieces together like a great jigsaw.






DP: Elisha Christian. Music: Hammock. Sound: Mac Smith / Brandon Proctor. All good.

It's rather good.

Kogonada in not a Japanese brand of  computer game but originally a documentarist of film-makers, everyone from Bresson to Tarantino, Anderson to Godard,

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