A Hong Kong violinist who’s losing her grip on reality, young Zi (Michelle Mao) is haunted by visions of her future self. The doctors at the local neurology center suspect that she might be suffering from the early symptoms of a brain tumor, but Zi — a being of pure cinema, cobbled together from the half-formed memories of films like “La Jetée” and “Cléo from 5 to 7” — will have to wait a long and lonely 24 hours for the test results to come back. Well, maybe not so lonely. Crying on one of the innumerable concrete steps that climb Lantau Island, Zi is consoled by a sweet American expat with a strangely familiar face (and an aggressively unnatural blonde wig). Her name is L, she’s a disillusioned former dancer played by the luminous Haley Lu Richardson, and she can’t help but reciprocate the inexplicable closeness that Zi feels towards her. Over the course of a single night together, these two lost souls will help to relocate each other in time — to resynchronize with the world around them, reconnect with the infinite potential of the present, and return themselves to the creative purpose that once anchored them to it. Even if seen without a shred of context, it would be obvious to anyone that “Zi” was made by someone who is — or hopefully was — desperate to spark a realignment of his own. To steal himself away from regret and anxiety and tether his perspective back to the now. Shot without a script or a budget in the immediate aftermath of Kogonada’s ill-received “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” (the “After Yang” auteur’s studio debut, by all indications a soul-crushing experience for an artist whose two previous features retained the delicate grace of the video essays that he used to make), this searching and unformed wisp of an experiment hardly represents the first time that an ascendent director has scaled down after a misstep, but “Zi” takes the notion of “one for me” to much greater and more galvanizing extremes than usual.This isn’t just a filmmaker trying to get back on track, it’s a filmmaker desperately, nakedly searching for a way to fall back in love with filmmaking itself. A way to prove that it might still love him back. (Kogonada described the project to IndieWire as “A retreat, as well as a pursuit.”)~this review continues on IndieWire~
