Adapted from Alexander Weinstein’s short story “Saying Goodbye To Yang”, Kogonada’s film deals primarily with the evolution of grief in a technologically advanced world. He made a deceptively small-scale drama where the tragedy of a family opens up more existential questions about the very nature of our precious memories in a time when everything is kept like a keepsake on our cell phones. Is our relationship with those we’ve left behind determined entirely by the memories we’ve created through the photos and videos we’ve posed for – images as much for the benefit of the world as our own? And does our need to create these artificial memories work against memorizing the big picture, with our thoughts of loved ones eventually being replaced by whatever else we have on our camera rolls over time?
The family tragedy here is the death of Yang (Justin H. Min), an artificial babysitter originally purchased to help her adopted daughter Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) stay tuned to her own Chinese heritage. Growing up, she was constantly fed information about her origins and about Chinese culture in general – all delivered in a register closer to that of a parent than a sibling or even an educator. Due to their close relationship, Yang is increasingly seen by the family as an adopted second son and is slowly welcomed more into their close bonding time, up to the regular dance competitions we see in the opening. When Yang malfunctions one day, immediate efforts to fix it fail and the family must all come to terms with how their relationships have changed, which particularly affects Jake. Allowed to keep Yang’s memories, he finds himself repeatedly diving in, recontextualizing his own memories, and discovering that Yang had an equally rich existence before he was purchased by the family.
The central novelty of “After Yang” is that it is a film set in a world where artificial intelligence in the form of advanced humanoid robots is commonplace, but achieves depth in the way it inspires us. makes us contemplate the realities of life without it. Kogonada separates us from the sleek, distinctly sci-fi future world he created largely out of budgetary necessities; the underground highways that connect family to city, populated by driverless cars, are shown entirely from inside the vehicle, for example, limiting the audience’s perspective on otherworldly creations that might otherwise distract emotional resonance. There’s every reason to think a “Blade Runner”-like future could exist on the fringes, but the writer/director is all about the human story at its core and refuses to let you get distracted by the larger world. Since Steven Spielberg’s “AI: Artificial Intelligence,” sci-fi world-building hasn’t existed entirely as a MacGuffin for a naturally human story. And here, Kogonada even subverts the stereotypical narrative of a robot developing consciousness, with the lessons of what it means to be human taught entirely to the grown man in the face of the loss of his family’s artificial babysitter.
