Movie Review: Columbus

It's rare these days that I see something so quiet. In fact, I'm writing about Columbus, a slow movie set in the modernist haven of Columbus, Indiana because I fell a bit in love with it. In the past year, everything in my life seems to demand an argument, action, an opinion, and while I believe that 97 percent of the time. Sometimes I want to step away from the argument, from the right way to think and just to be in the quiet space of being a human being wandering about this confusing and wondrous world.
If I were to summarize Columbus, I'd say long tracking shots of beautiful architecture, reminiscent in some ways of Richard Linklater, but slower because sometimes the characters aren't talking, the spaces aren't necessarily given meaning by the character's presence or absence. Rather, the movie seems to ask if the modernist structures have a meaning in and of themselves, apart from humans, in the way that a mountain is still beautiful whether we are beholding it or not. For me, this question of aesthetics and modernism is the real heart of the film. The movie is full of long silences, light on water, on the underside of leaves, but it never quite dips into the full reverie of Terence Malik either. It just seems to delight in the details of life. I too, would like to delight in the details.

Of course, most television shows and movies are about shipping. And so the movie also centers on the relationship between a young woman, who works part-time in a library. She's a year beyond high school, far too intelligent to just be shelving books but she's also not sure if she can leave behind her mother for an offer to a study with a famous architect in New Haven.  The young woman develops a deep and soothing relationship with an architects son, in town to witness the decline of his famous father after a sudden heart attack. The son of the architect, like the young woman, has a tendentiosu relationship with his father. Thus, both of the characters are temporarily bound to Columbus because of their parents, and it's in this temporary in between space that their relationship flourishes, traveling between architectural marvels and talking about their parents, their lives, or just the way that a sunken living room was designed. In short, it's slow. But it's not agonizing. Rather, it's slow in the way that it's slow to watch the subtle v that the water makes as it passes the body of a swan.

It's rare to find a movie so in touch with stillness, with the way that a piece of sky, set between two long beams can be achingly beautiful. The filmmaker, Koganda, is a video essayist, and his essay about modernist architecture and the internal struggle we have with our parents, with growth and change, is a mesmerizing one.