How does a movie start that talks about nothing? How does insignificance encapsulate a series of moving images conveyed as a possible ontology of something that is not but wants to be? ‘Saying Goodbye to Yang’, the second kogonada film that can be seen on Amazon Prime Video, assumes that the nature of existence is inscrutable, and pursues between the recesses of its images and its montages of overlapping sounds, an unreality that can represent the real by opposition so that nostalgia when looking at the void allows us to contemplate the whole.
The new from the director of the harmonica ‘Colombus’ walk the path of zen with tea ceremonies in which lees shine through from the containment of Yasujiro Ozu’s dialogues, the metaphysical sorrow of ‘Blade Runner’, the stoic existentialism of Kazuo Ishiguro, the self-portraits of Vivian Maier or the non-time of memory in ‘La Jetée’. It does so from science fiction with the story of a fragmented family that, after an interrupted synchronization after the film’s memorable initial dance, tries to cauterize the wound from the possible disappearance of the title’s own Yang, a cyborg who continues dancing until his death. deadly disconnect.
Thus, the film runs through the vicissitudes of the memory of the disconnected young man, a technosapien that simulates a very successful humanity in a hypothetical future where artifice has led to the creation of androids for all kinds of uses, something similar to what happened in ‘Klara and the Sun’, Ishiguro’s last book. And, as with the humanoids described by the writer, who meanders through his narration as he scrutinizes the meaning of these possible beings, the story dislocated through the uneven memories that Yang’s hard drive preserves never leaves metaphysical doubt. .
‘Saying Goodbye to Yang’ tries to unite the pieces of its protagonist through the forced action of the couple formed by Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith) and, especially, Jake, who is played by an orientalist Colin Farrell) and who tries, for all the means, regain consciousness of the brother robot. Not in vain, Yang is a pillar in the life of his daughter Mika, a girl accompanied from birth by the technosapien who apprehended Chinese culture. so that he was the one to teach the little girl about her roots, in a peculiar speculation about a certain white conscience that assumes the impossibility of teaching the roots of a minority from a foreign prism.
The dregs of kogonada: self-portraits, no-time and the puzzle of memory
The otherness that Yang experiences is, moreover, double: on the one hand, that of a self-awareness as an artificial other whose Asian roots are imposted, and on the other, that of the tension between natural humanity and the possible humanity of an entity that has been created but feels the existence as his own (which, in turn, resonates in the father’s gaze on the clones). These meanings are expressed in the dialogues housed in Yang’s memory, outlining his dissonances and doubts, but, especially, through the humanoid’s gazes in mirrorsvisions that Jake will contemplate plunged through the strangeness of those strange memories.
And, as if it were a self-portrait by Vivian Maier, Yang’s looks at his own figure from a mirror are also a reflection of a search for his own existence, a trace of its reality that the photographer captured with her camera and the robot registers with its eyealso part of the machine (but, if we think of moving images, isn’t the camera an extension of the eye in that capture?) The parallelism, moreover, continues: both Maier and Yang prove and claim their existence through the self-portrait on a private and personal level that ends up being publicly exposed.
The memories of the techno-sapiens that Jake revisits, which never follow a possible temporal linearity, overlap in reverse shots in which, edited by cutting, reverberate with the same sound that has been heard seconds before from a new visual perspective but also of tone or rhythm. A formula that Kogonada, also the film’s editor, repeats throughout ‘Saying Goodbye to Yang’ to carry out a possible but confusing reconstruction of the memory of his robotic protagonist that could well parallel the nature of his memories with those of a human being: diluted, modulated and even involuntarily modified over time.
The film also reconstructs and updates one of kogonada’s fetishes: Yasujiro Ozu’s dialogues with 360-degree frontal reverse shots, which here take the form of video calls between Jake and Kyra, narrating their approaches to a beautiful couple’s meal. A revisited obsession that could pass for a pleasant but inane reference and that reveals itself as an exhaustive understanding about the work of the director of ‘Tokyo Tales’; Well, these seemingly nondescript and contained dialogues, a fundamental sign of Ozu’s cinema but also of the spirit of ‘Saying Goodbye to Yang’, hide in the gaps between what is said and what is silent, the most pressing subtexts and the most meaningful understanding of life.
‘Saying Goodbye to Yang’: Do Androids Dream of Tea Ceremonies?
The observation in the film, which adopts Jake’s gaze, could be similar to what the viewer would make about the film, as an awareness that for the father goes through, if not accepting, at least thinking about the possible life of a robot, and, for the spectator, the possible change of conception about a look that would seem self-absorbed and superficial around one of the most canonized directors in the history of cinema and that ends in the exploration of a space where there is nothing and everything is hidden.
This digitization that updates the cinephile obsession also means the way in which the film addresses otherness from the filmic and the roboticsince the apparent orientalist assimilation of Ozu, like the artificial identity, by extension, superficial and false, of Yang, always hides the same background: how one thinks about one’s own existence from the contradictions of the android, with a constructed and , a priori, never genuine, rooted in a culture never lived, in a land never trodden on, in an air never breathed.
In this possible future, oppression does not disappear: it transforms. There are glances over the shoulder at second-rate existences: technosapiens as an artifice that can be purchased for a price, and clones, parallel and duplicate existences that lose their value with respect to the original, and those denied bodies are a new Other. Post-colonization, certainly perverse, is turbocapitalized and robotizedand the way to teach about non-hegemonic identities is to buy a robot-brother whose roots are mere data, an explanation of facts not experienced by the person who shares them.
How does a movie that talks about nothing end? In all its interstices and denials, ‘Saying Goodbye to Yang’ seeks a possible but elusive answer by observing existence through contingency, with a nostalgic look into the void; the real from science fiction, when thinking about our world from the unreal; and representation through cinema, an artifice without apparent sense. Because, although it is not the answer to his questions, kogonada insists: we look with pity at nothing because it is an indispensable condition for, by opposition, anything to exist.