Kogonada takes another step back with ‘zi’

If you weren’t taken by the sentimentality and slick sheen of A Big Bold Beautiful Journey—a fun film that, for better or worse, takes a back-to-basics look at Hollywood romance—then Kogonada’s follow-up will be alluring on paper. Over three weeks, the director re-teamed with his Columbus and After Yang star Haley Lu Richardson (among others) to shoot a moody, DIY experiment in the expanse of Hong Kong. Titled zi, it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and functions as a kind of post-studio cleanse for the filmmaker, as he tries to tell a character-driven (and aesthetic-driven) sci-fi story with a unique structural bent. Sadly, his cinematic search for his own voice, and where he might go next, turns up few engaging answers.

I was one of the rare fans of the director’s previous effort, which I described (positively, mind you) as being “straight out of a freshman writing exercise.” For all its flaws, it seemed to stem from an unencumbered sense of creative hygiene, despite the constraints likely placed on it at an executive level. This is also true of zi, and the lack of moneyed overlords is an exciting prospect, but the result also happens to be far more scattered. With a 16mm camera at his disposal, Kogonada trains his lens on abstract, disembodied images and visual references (for instance, to the films of Powell and Pressburger) and seems to glue them together after the fact, as though his story were a secondary concern. Whether or not this was really his process, it’s a feeling that colors zi from start to finish. It’s also not necessarily an incorrect approach. After all, the movie follows a disoriented young woman, Zi (Michelle Mao), who perceives time in strange ways, and feels untethered from her very being.

We first meet Zi in the form of disconnected closeups along a harbor, in shots infected by the warm, red-and-white glow of celluloid light spills—the kind you usually see just before a film reel ends. Whether intentional or otherwise, these light spills grant Zi a ghostly presence, as though this were some kind of ending (or new beginning). They seem to indicate that the most interesting moments Kogonada captured occurred outside the confines and structures of traditional filmmaking—perhaps when the film ran out, or when he’d already called “cut.” These are glimmers of reality found between layers of fiction.

That you might see something like this in a film school experiment speaks further to Kogonada’s recent creative regress, which isn’t a bad thing in and of itself. Everyone needs a reset from time to time, and searching past the established contours of storytelling seems like a worthwhile locus for this introspection. In Kogonada’s case, his origins as a video essayist come to mind, especially the way he isolates images and frames from their larger context in order to expose hidden meaning. However, when he employs this tactic in zi, that initial context barely exists in the first place. What follows is a meandering search for an answer to a question that isn’t properly articulated.

The first thing we learn about Zi, an idea the director-editor introduces gradually and wordlessly, is the non-linear way she perceives her surroundings. Closeups of her confused expression straight to camera cut to wider shots of people in motion—a basic cinematic language we understand, almost intrinsically, as introducing her point of view—only she appears to be present in these wide shots too. Her gaze anchors us, before guiding us to an impossible reverse-shot; could she be looking at some tilt-shifted, time-slipped version of herself?

This would hardly be the first time a filmmaker has played with POV this way. It’s how the climax of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey jumps through time, and it’s how Marcin Wrona channeled his depression in the Polish horror movie Demon, which captured the feeling of dissociation. Kogonada is in company, and he uses this trick of editing to establish a mystery in which Zi chases herself, but never quite catches up, and grows increasingly distraught in the process. As she breaks down on a semi-public staircase, she’s approached by a kindly American outsider in a blond wig (Richardson), who tries to comfort her, but it turns out Zi may have seen this woman before, in one of her apparent visions. In the meantime, the camera also catches stray shots of mysterious young man (Jin Ha) following Zi from afar, observing this story as it unfolds, and perhaps even shaping it, as though Kogonada were granting himself physical form within his movie.

These are not altogether uninteresting places to start. Key dialogue hints at some strange metaphysical condition that might be coloring Zi’s perspective, while other exchanges frame Richardson’s character as a manic pixie dream girl of sorts, an outdated cinematic “type” who, in this film, takes the form of a caring audiophile who loves to record the bustling sounds of Hong Kong, to no real end. With these parameters established, Kogonada moves between shots of the cityscape and even more exchanges that seek to flesh out both characters as they narrate their respective pasts, in a manner that can’t help but meander. It often feels like zi is circling a point about outsiders feeling at a distance from themselves, but the way it captures this sensation (and the related feeling of Zi moving elliptically through time) never changes or evolves, and keeps returning to the same small handful of flashes which repeat ad nauseam.

It’s a great idea for a short film, but the more zi tries to peel back emotional layers over 99 minutes, the more it reveals itself as dispiritingly hollow. While its lingering shots of faces and environments invite ponderous questions—does a camera create meaning, or does it simply excavate what’s already there?—the answers it suggests seldom work in its favor. There’s a 15-or-so minute stretch when the editing and unspooling narrative retroactively imbues the images with more meaning than you might expect (which is to say, when Zi’s strange cognitive abilities become the key focus of the story), but the movie very quickly returns to what amounts to a dull relationship drama focused on the characters explaining past actions we never see, and whose weight we never feel, despite their prowess and performers.

Kogonada has long been a filmmaker of tremendous artistry—After Yang, for instance, uses texture to effectively explore questions of living memory—but this time around, his flourishes rarely cohere. While there’s intrigue to watching a seasoned filmmaker assemble raw, unvarnished footage in brand new permutations (he uses its darkened contrast to engender curiosity), the sum total can’t help but feel amateurish in execution. Little is learned or probed amid this apparent quest to understand temporality, and our place within it. The only thing that really comes of zi is pseudo-romantic musings that use Hong Kong as an interchangeable metropolitan backdrop, and a city of global interlopers. (Set the movie in Paris, Mumbai, or Seoul, and little would change.)

Whatever demons Kogonada may have needed to exorcise, one can only hope that zi marks the end of this spiritual purge, and not the beginning of an unfortunate creative downturn. It really is a film of wonderful ideas, one whose surface takes stirring form. But it’s also one whose underlying layers are rendered null by a thoughtless approach to its own bigger picture.