‘Zi’ Review: Kogonada Changes Course for a Small, Slight, Beautiful Journey

Light and shimmery and intricately formed as a dandelion clock, Kogonada‘s 2017 debut “Columbus” walked a fine tonal line between poetic and prosaic, intellect and feeling, all without slipping into preciousness. That balance can be hard to maintain when budgets get bigger and concepts higher: The director’s sci-fi follow-up “After Yang” was handsome, ambitious and a bit fey, but still preferable to the gloopy tweeness of last year’s Margot Robbie-Colin Farrell dud “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey.” Coming swiftly on that film’s heels, Kogonoda’s fourth feature “Zi” feels a clear attempt at course-correction: a jagged, mood-driven miniature, sharing his debut’s fascination with urban geography and loudly ambient silence, and reuniting him with “Columbus” star Haley Lu Richardson to boot.

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“Zi,” too, is not the film that “Columbus” is, but it represents a more fruitful creative direction for its helmer — whose odd, ruminative worldview appears to be better served by free-range independent production than high-gloss studio cinema. Shot in just three weeks in Hong Kong, taking an off-the-cuff approach in line with the unmoored wanderings of its characters, this translucent study of a mentally addled young woman finding an unlikely ally in an American outsider begins promisingly, mixing everyday city portraiture with glitchy flashes of uncanny psychodrama.

Yet the many small, darting ideas in Kogonoda’s script never quite add up to a big one. “Zi’s” chief pleasures are ambient, whether capturing the fluorescent glare and sonic bustle of a night market, or the hard, still sweep of an empty concrete walkway. Premiering in Sundance’s more experimentally-oriented Next section, the film is too wispy to be more than a fringe arthouse prospect, though its rich visual and sonic textures will be best served by theatrical showings.

As the film introduces young concert violinist Zi (Michelle Mao) in a state of disarray, pacing the sidewalks and cemeteries and back alleys of Hong Kong, it takes some time for her fragments of anguish to coalesce into something resembling a narrative. We learn that her parents have passed away, though it’s not clear how recently. At their graveside, she frets aloud that their faces might slip her faltering memory, and she won’t recognize them in the afterlife. Such mortal concerns aren’t just in her head, or rather, they’re very literally in her head: She’s recently been diagnosed with a potential brain tumor, while her neurological ailments may account for the unnerving out-of-body visions she keeps having of her future self.

When she’s approached in the street by kindly, concerned American stranger Elle (Richardson), Zi is convinced they’ve already met, at least in her time-scrambled consciousness. Kogonada’s slender script, too, implies something cosmically fated about this apparent chance encounter, a not-quite-coincidence also tangled up in Elle’s relationship with her estranged fiancé Min (Jin Ha) — who’s stalking both women unbeknownst to them, and also works at the neurological clinic that Zi is scheduled to visit the next day. There’s some initial intrigue in these cryptic, temporally out-of-sync connections, teasing a lo-fi supernatural shift that never takes flight, before Kogonada moves onto his next airily philosophical tangent.

“Zi” is most rewarding, however, at its least complicated, as it tracks a fast-building kinship between two young women feeling alone and unsettled in a city that buzzes unfeelingly around them. Elle, clearly carrying her own damage beneath a crinkly smile and a yellow dime-store wig, insists on spending the day with the agitated Zi, cuing a directionless walking tour of bustling city-centre hotspots and abandoned passageways, al fresco noodle shops and shabby karaoke bars. All are shot with unprettified but tactile warmth and, later, a muted nighttime glow by cinematographer Benjamin Loeb, picking out small pools of color (Zi’s cherry-red shoulder bag, intrusions of verdant foliage) in the urban grayscale.

Much of the bonding here is tacit, which is for the best when Kogonada’s dialogue can veer into banal overstatement. “I’ve always felt untethered, detached, floating in this world,” Zi says somewhat unnecessarily, given how the filmmaking language has already established that sense of anxious drift. Mao is sympathetic in a largely reactive role, conveying interior crisis through brittle body language and a deep, distracted gaze. While the reliably charismatic Richardson is a welcome animating force, the character of Elle is even more sketchily conceived, down to a hobby — the recording and collection of city sounds — that feels more an extension of the director’s interests than anything else.

On the plus side, those sounds are most vibrantly collected. “Zi” thrums with with the oceanic rush of traffic, the patter and chatter of pedestrians, the delicate assertions of nature and weather against a wall of man-made noise — all jostling for our ears’ attention with Kogonoda’s typically elegant musical selections, which run the gamut from liquid piano pieces by the late Ryuichi Sakamoto (to whom the film is dedicated) to bristling electronica to Richardson’s tipsy, spirited wailing of Alanis Morissette’s “One Hand in My Pocket.” If the film weren’t so arresting to look at, it could often be absorbed with eyes closed: If its larger message is elusive, “Zi” advocates for taking the world in at your own sensory pace.