Korean-American auteur Kogonada has until now been known for his intriguingly complex, cerebral essayistic movies, such as Columbus and After Yang, whose emotional content, though potent, isn’t immediately obvious. Now he has made the leap into a big, bold, primary-coloured romantic phantasmagoria, as if Chris Marker had remade The Umbrellas of Cherbourg for the American multiplex with two unfeasibly beautiful Hollywood stars. This is a musical without musical numbers (without its own musical numbers, anyway) and a romantic comedy mostly without comedy – an imbalance it shares with most romcoms in fact. The screenwriter is Seth Reiss, co-author of the (much chillier) drama The Menu, with Ralph Fiennes as a scary chef.
What Kogonada and Reiss are offering is a likably uncynical, heart-on-sleeve wish-fulfilment spectacular, which gradually retreats from its initial, borderline insufferable self-awareness. Or maybe it’s just that you get used to it. We are plunged into a woozy daydream as multicoloured as a ball pit in a kids’ play centre, all about love, relationships and the overwhelming importance of being open and risking emotional hurt to find the One. This involves coming to terms with your past and how you feel about your passionately remembered parents who are either dead or at any rate don’t tactlessly appear on screen in their present elderly form.
