[Cannes 2021] Kogonada’s “After Yang”: A dazzling, minimalist sci-fi film about artificial intelligence.

Science fiction has so accustomed us for years to dystopian futures that there is something radical about the image of a desirable future, as portrayed in “After Yang”, presented at Un Certain Regard.

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In this superb American film, directed by the mysterious Kogonada and produced by the wonderboys of A24, misfortune has (fortunately) not disappeared, but patriarchy, racism or ecocide seem to be problems solved, or at least sufficiently mitigated for n not be approached.

Few details are given about this miraculously balanced society, but humans seem to have found a way to live there in harmony, with each other and with nature, and there is no other antagonist than the dirty tricks of the world. life – except, all the same, a capitalism tending to spy on private life, but about which, again, little is known.

It is because the young filmmaker of Korean origin, with the pseudo inspired by the fetish screenwriter of Yasujiro Ozu, Kogo Nodo, known in the American cinema spheres for his brilliant video critical essays (on Wes Anderson, Godard, Bresson, Tarantino …) and for his first feature Colombus (big critical success in 2017 but unprecedented in France), its purpose is less sociological than metaphysical. The social is not absent from his film, and he asks questions about identity, but what really occupies him are existential, universal questions: how does memory work, what constitutes experience? human, or what binds individuals together?

Colin Farrell, brilliantly mineral, as in his best roles, here plays a father who makes luxury tea (Truffaut, who loved the original crafts, would no doubt have appreciated this one), who is married to Jodie Turner Smith ( stunning actress revealed by Queen and Slim), and who adopted a little Chinese girl, to whom he offered a synthetic big brother. The eponymous Yang is thus a robot, or rather a “techno-sapiens” endowed with encyclopedic knowledge, indistinguishable from a human, responsible for connecting his little sister Mika to his Chinese culture of which his adoptive parents have only a vague idea. – in this, it is indeed a film of its time, marked by the American obsessions of the moment.

From Blade Runner at Ghost in the Shell, from A.I. at Ex Machina (to name only the films to which After Yang most thinks), cinema has generally portrayed androids as problematic beings, in conflict with their creators. Yang is different. If he is similar, in certain respects, to the little David of the A.I. de Spielberg, his adoptive parents do not wish him any harm, on the contrary: they spend their time trying to repair it, following a fatal failure that deprives them of his comforting presence. Dragging his inanimate body from repairer to repairer, they manage to penetrate his digital brain and survey its memories, discovering that they have an exceptional being in their hands …

The scenario, deeply original despite its themes seen and reviewed, unfolds with great skill over a short period (1h41), never ceasing to surprise at each branch.

But it is by its style that Kogonada impresses the most. Having spent a decade analyzing that of the great masters, he was able to create his own, which we could certainly compare to certain Asian filmmakers (like Edward Yang) but who find their own breaths there. The Korean-born director indeed finds prodigious figurative solutions to represent tropes of science fiction that we thought were exhausted.

Telephone communications are thus simple frontal fields / reverse fields gluing disjointed spaces with infinite elegance; the numerous trips by car are like coffee discussions, filmed through windows reflecting sublime lighting; memory, finally, is a library of small luminous points giving access to fleeting and magnificent scenes (representing the formidable Haley Lou Richardson).

As minimalist as it is deep, of infinite delicacy, After Yang is a theorem whose resolution belongs to the spectator, and which should guarantee its author recognition beyond the United States.

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