Zi Is An Existential Dream Wrapped In A Time-Travel Movie
Kogonada goes back to basics in a tiny, subtle, beautiful journey through time and Hong Kong.
A woman gazes wistfully at the camera, her jet-black hair obscuring her face as it whips around in the wind. It’s an image that Zi, Kogonada’s dreamy new sci-fi drama that just premiered out of Sundance Film Festival, keeps returning to, over and over again. Is it a half-remembered memory? A vision of the future? Or maybe both?
This is the question upon which Zi hinges its curious sci-fi plot, in which a woman finds herself experiencing visions of her future self. But the film’s whisper of a plot and its spontaneous structure allows Kogonada to plumb the dreamy, existential cinematic depths that his films have always explored so well, making Zi feel like a welcome return to form after the director’s big, ungainly swing with last year’s A Big Bold Beautiful Journey. And while Zi is almost too slight to feel substantial, it is, inarguably, unforgettable.
Michelle Mao strikes an ethereal presence in Zi.
Zi begins with the eponymous young woman (Michelle Mao) visiting the grave of her parents in Hong Kong, where she mourns that she was not able to do enough for them. Then, almost as if in a daze, she wanders through the bustling city streets, until she stops on an isolated staircase where she breaks down crying. A concerned stranger, who introduces herself as Elle (Haley Lu Richardson), asks if she’s all right, but Zi only stares at her in confusion that transforms into shock. She had seen Elle before, next to a woman who looked a lot like Zi. It’s at this moment that Zi starts to suspect that she’s seeing visions of her future self. But Zi doesn’t quite believe that she’s unlocked some supernatural ability; rather, she attributes these hallucinations to a tumor that may have been discovered in her brain during an earlier visit to Hong Kong’s Center for Neurology. An increasingly concerned Elle offers to take her to her neurologist friend, Min (Jin Ha), to get more answers on her condition, thus leading the three of them to embark on a strange, winding journey through the streets of Hong Kong, their lives — both past and present — intertwining and colliding.
An all-night odyssey that unfolds at a deliberate, ambling pace, Zi is more mood piece than movie. It plays out through Zi, Elle, and Min’s awkward and painfully intimate interactions and through obscure images like the aforementioned close-up of Zi that keeps popping up. These visions — which also include one recurring image of an elderly woman comforting an older Zi — are like puzzle pieces for Zi to put together, some of which get fulfilled later that night, some of which are far-off visions of what could be. But there’s no indication that these visions are part of a larger plot or higher stakes, apart from a diagnosis that Min makes that Zi is suffering from something called “temporal relativism.” Rather, they are part of the film’s dreamlike makeup of stolen moments and lost time — the kind of fractured portrait of personhood that Kogonada excelled at painting in his exquisite sci-fi masterpiece, After Yang. But in Zi, this portrait feels even more undefined, and intentionally so.
Its thinly sketched out plot is a feature, not a bug, and a result of a sort of experiment that Kogonada conducted. The film came about after Kogonada invited six of his close friends — including Mao, Richardson, Ha, and his regular cinematographer Benjamin Loeb and producers Chung An and Christopher Radcliff — to fly to Hong Kong on their own dime with a vague outline of a movie and a shoestring budget. They developed the idea as they shot the film, and three weeks later, produced Zi.
After Kogonada found himself uncomfortably butting up against the visual maximalism of Big Bold Beautiful Journey, the director finds himself more at home in the feather-light Zi, which feels in many ways like the photo negative of Journey. It’s subtle where Journey was big, quiet where it was theatrical, humble where it was ambitious. But in the same way that Journey saw Kogonada navigating his filmic influences (drawing heavily from Hayao Miyazaki films), Zi pulls from other filmmakers — the vibrant visual poetry of Wong Kar-wai or the hangout-movie loveliness of Richard Linklater. Kogonada’s loving attention to the rhythms and crowds of Hong Kong, which Loeb wistfully trains his camera on in an almost documentary-style manner, feel most evocative of Wong. But Zi’s focus on flashes of cryptic images, and the frequent return to a single image — burned in both our protagonist’s brain and ours — recall most plainly Chris Marker’s 1962 short film La jetée, which would go on to inspire Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys.
After appearing in both Columbus and After Yang, Haley Lu Richardson has proven to be Kogonada’s strongest onscreen collaborator.
That Zi plays like a collection of filmic homages isn’t bad necessarily, but it does make this film feel even more of a piece with Journey: both movies show Kogonada trying to synthesize his film influences in a way that works for him. Zi, thankfully, shows that he’s a little bit closer to reaching that goal.
It’s because Zi is such an intimate character piece, hinging heavily on the intimate moments between Zi, Elle, and Min, that it manages to leave such an indelible mark despite being so feather-light. Mao is wonderfully vulnerable and lost, while Richardson proves herself to be Kogonada’s most reliable onscreen collaborator, providing a sense of wounded whimsy that lights up the screen even when the director puts her in the most distractingly cheap wig. And Ha proves himself a solid, sympathetic anchor for Zi and Elle, as Min quietly yearns for Elle and tries his best to warn Zi of her condition.
“For you, it’s always the past,” he tells Zi. And that’s true of her, but also of the film, which already feels like a snapshot of a rapidly disappearing time and place, shot in a method that’s also fast disappearing. It’s lo-fi sci-fi at its best, and most indelible.
