Minari And The Art Of Gentle Cinema
Revisiting Lee Isaac Chung’s 2021 Drama. Told with tenderness, the Korean American family story possesses a pacifying touch.
Just as things were opening up again in the UK following the global pandemic, Minari (2020) was one of the first independent films I saw at the Prince Charles Cinema in Leicester Square, and was one of the first in a small handful of dates I went on with my now-girlfriend Silvia. After finding our seat and sitting through the beloved opening adverts at the Prince Charles, the lights dimmed and the film started. It revealed a small boy in the backseat of his parents car, watching the unfamiliar landscape of Arkansas roll on by through the window, in quiet anticipation for his new home, as Emile Mosseri’s impeccable score wrapped around us both in a warm, welcoming embrace.
Minari is an American drama film written and directed by Lee Isaac Chung starring Steven Yeun, Han Ye-ri, Alan Kim, Noel Kate Cho and Youn Yuh-jung, and concerns itself with the Yi family: Korean immigrants who, from the get-go of the film, have moved over from California to a plot of rural land in Arkansas in 1983, with the hopes of starting a farm growing Korean produce. That said, listing the cast and providing the plot synopsis almost feels lost on a film like Minari, because Minari is the type of film that’s more focused on the dynamics between the characters, as opposed to the three-act structure of your regular Hollywood fairytale.
Just from writing the plot synopsis alone, I can already tell you’re making assumptions about the heartwarming narrative. Your typical fish out of water story, the family will move to an unfamiliar land where they’ll face the trials and tribulations of racial discrimination, but through the power of perseverance and kindness of their community, their farm will thrive and they’ll come out the other side stronger than ever. And hey, maybe even their southern-American neighbours will realise these foreign strangers aren’t that different from them after all!
Well, to be honest, Minari is kind of that film, and it flies ever so close to being that film, but to be truthful… My memory of the film has become a bit hazy as I haven’t seen Minari since its UK release in May of 2021. Because this essay isn’t really about Minari, but more my memory of Minari, and how its gentle and tender approach to drama has stuck with me since.
So much about the introduction felt so unassuming and unremarkable, but the quiet expectations and anxieties of the small boy in the car oddly felt so familiar as I was admittedly readying myself to be back at the cinema, back to normality, and embarking on this new relationship with someone who would turn out to become very important to me. Something as simple as a boy in the back of a car, unfamiliar with the scepticism and emotional baggage of being an adult, elicited such feelings of insane gratitude I had for the simple things that I didn’t have before, and every time I revisit Mosseri’s soundtrack I get reacquainted with that warmth again and again.
What follows that opening scene is sort of more of the same. Sure, the family are faced with the challenges of running a farm without any guidance or knowledge of the land; Stephen Yeun’s character, Jacob, shows resilience and blind optimism in the face of rightful scepticism by his wife Monica, ‘We said we wanted a new start. This is it’, he reassures her. Likewise, the children, David and Anne, find adapting to their new lives challenging, especially with the unexpected introduction of their grandmother, Soon-ja, played by Youn Yuh-jung, into their already tiny home-on-wheels.
But the way in which Chung chooses to unfold the ensuing drama is done so in a quiet manner — it’s less about the narrative beats themselves, and more about how the characters respond to them and uses this as a stage to explore ideas of parenthood, childhood, masculinity, marriage, brotherhood, sisterhood, religion, race and how we ultimately can’t control these very human things. In the same way Jacob can’t wrestle the land beneath his feet into growing his crops, he also can’t twist his family into believing his American dream of making the family rich and prosperous. The parents can’t cure David of his heart condition, Soon-ja can’t escape her old age and Monica can’t stop Jacob’s misguided perseverance.
Instead, what the characters do begin to realise is the importance of the support network they are able to provide each other, despite these fundamental obstacles. For instance, David struggles to meet eye-to-eye with his distant-grandmother, but as soon as they both reveal their respective weaknesses, they find themselves in a very unsuspecting relationship. When David hurts himself after a shelf collapses on him, Soon-ja patches him up with a bandage and calls him a ‘strong boy’, which she’s shocked to learn he’s never been labelled before, not even by his parents, and tenderly addresses the character trait that David feels he’s lacking. Elsewhere, despite Jacob’s attempts to be the strong, masculine father in front of David, we later see Monica tenderly washing his broken body in the bath after a physically taxing day on the farm, despite her waning faith in her husband’s endeavours.
You see, it’s these modest and gentle moments, and signs of support and affection for each other that is throughout the fabric of Minari, and it’s something I’ve since been drawn to in music, literature and cinema as I’ve begun to show gratitude for them in my own life too, post-pandemic. Moments like this are rife in Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson (2016), most notably when Adam Driver’s character composes a poem about Ohio Blue Tip matches as a vehicle to express his love for his wife…
“Here is the most beautiful match in the world,
It’s one-and-a-half-inch soft pine stem capped
By a grainy dark purple head, so sober and furious
And stubbornly ready to burst into flame
Lighting, perhaps, the cigarette of the woman you love,
For the first time, and it was never really the
same after that…”
In this film, Adam Driver’s Paterson is more than just a bus driver, he’s a husband, and he’s a poet. Like how I am more than just my job, I’m more than my achievements, and the things and people in my life are more than just narrative beats in a larger, unfolding plot.
Like most people, life hasn’t been very Hollywood these last couple of years. I haven’t experienced humongous, life-defining achievements and I’ve been extremely fortunate enough to avoid the devastation of the pandemic. Instead, I’ve found solace in baking bread and sharing it with my friends and family, going for walks and getting coffee with my partner, running home from work, and spending sober time with my housemates (who almost feel like another family altogether). So much of the last two years has been outside of my control, but sometimes the things in your life that you can mindfully, and tenderly, appreciate are often found on a smaller scale.
It’s these moments between the festivals, the holidays, the promotions, and the people we choose to be present with and love, that make up the building blocks of our lives. Two or three years ago, I probably imagined a life much different to how it is now, and if I could go back in time and tell my past self who I’ve become, I wonder how I’d react.
But at this point in time, if my life can be as gentle and as mindful as the narratives of my favourite works of fiction, then that’s pretty okay.
By Chris Hambling
