They’re known as “techno-sapiens.” In order to raise their adopted Chinese daughter, a struggling Anglo tea shop owner and a Black businesswoman — married but growing ever-more-faintly distant from each other — go to a discount retail outlet known as Second Siblings and buy a used techno, a companion wired to the digital brim with knowledge regarding their daughter’s cultural heritage.
That’s the premise of “After Yang,” an exquisite bit of futurism from the filmmaker known as Kogonada. His debut feature, the Indiana-set romance “Columbus,” signaled a writer-director of unusual patience and visual temperament. “After Yang” is just as good, in a different direction. It opened at the Landmark Century Centre March 4, the same day Kogonada’s film made its streaming premiere on Showtime.
Kogonada’s adaptation of the 2016 Alexander Weinstein short story “Saying Goodbye to Yang” begins years after this family of three has essentially adopted the techno, who happens to be an Asian-designed adult, as a second child. He, or it, is played by Justin H. Min. Colin Farrell and Jodie Turner-Smith portray the parents; the young girl, Mika, hopelessly devoted to her brotherly companion Yang, is played by an effortless charmer named Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja.
I hesitate to go into too much about the plot of “After Yang,” not because it’s spoiler-y but because Kogonada’s interests aren’t really about the plot at all. Early on, Yang malfunctions, seriously, after the family’s customary “monthly dance-off” (a virtual reality competition, wittily realized). Mika is distraught. The family isn’t sure what to do next. Repair? Let the techno decompose?
The father takes a tip from a neighbor (Clifton Collins Jr.) about a techno repair expert (Ritchie Coster), prone to surveillance conspiracy theories and racist views in what appears to be a late 21st/early 22nd century America. What the repairman discovers inside Yang’s wires and guts raises questions of what it means to be human, at a time when humans, technos and human clones share the same world — and everyone talks about buying or repairing technos as if they were just another smartphone.
Haley Lu Richardson, wonderful in “Columbus,” “Support the Girls” and everything else she has done, enters the story as a clone who had her own close friendship on the sly with Yang. This is science fiction with a fantastically light-fingered touch. Big themes, typically treated in the movies with heavy overlays of paranoia and menace, float like Yang’s precious butterflies in Kogonada’s hands.
A child’s grief at the loss of a loved one, matters of privacy and the limits of artificial intelligence; these and other topics guide the storytelling. The visual effects are sparingly deployed and often truly beautiful, when we see, for example, what Yang sees, or how Farrell’s character accesses Yang’s memory recordings. (Also, I love the way the cars of this near-future, plainly electric and whisper-quiet, are shown only as interior shots.)
There are moments in the second half of “After Yang” when some of the narrative beats get a little confusing or vague. Kogonada’s steady, often still, but never static compositions may not be enough for some viewers. Whatever. Clearly, actors respond to what he’s after. Farrell and Turner-Smith, besides being insanely photogenic subjects, contain their emotions and use their voices so each moment and each interaction (or evasion) registers, without any actorly “indicating.”
Do androids dream of electric sheep? Philip K. Dick posed that question. The question in “After Yang” is related, sort of, but gracefully humane and gently luminous in its execution: Do androids wish they were human? Or is that a question, as one character notes, that is sadly presumptive of humans to ask?
‘After Yang’ — 3.5 stars (out of four)
MPAA rating: PG (language and some thematic elements)
Running time: 1:36
How to watch: At Landmark Century Centre Cinema and streaming on Showtime.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
Twitter @phillipstribune
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