The Politics of Beauty in "After Yang"

Comparisons between Kogonada's new film, "After Yang," and his earlier one, "Columbus," are inevitable, and their differences obscure the big idea that unites them. "After Yang" is a science-fiction film, set in a vague future time at an unspecified place, seemingly in the United States; its title character is an android, or "technosapien." "Columbus," his first feature, from 2017, is set in its own present day, in the real-life city of Columbus, Indiana, and centered on a young woman played by Haley Lu Richardson. "After Yang" is a synthetic work of dystopian imagination, and "Columbus" is a carefully realistic view of its place and time. Nonetheless, the two films are propelled by the same impulse: the artistic basis of mental life, the politics of aesthetics.