“Minari”: what the 2021 Oscar nominee is about that everyone compares to “Parasites”

Those who have had lisurious and unconventional grandmothers deeply understand what the director Lee Isaac Chungtoma she meant in her film, “Minari,” when she chose to combine the temperament of an elderly woman with the survival of an immigrant family. This film, which has raised cultural criticism to a very positive level, will compete in six categories at the Oscars on Sunday, April 25.

It is already compared to “Parasites”, the film that won the Oscar Award for Best Picture in 2020, because it is another drama with those touches of Asian, almost black humor, “a work of extraordinary delicacy, poignancy and tenderness” or “a simple story , beautifully told”, as international critics have praised.

It is not a drama, but a film directed by an American with South Korean roots who wanted to draw fragments of his past with his camera. “Minari” redefines the personal memory of its author, but also the public one, by going back to 1980 in a piece of fertile land in Arkansas, United States, and telling the difficulty of being a foreigner in a Western society.

IMMIGRATION

The curtain opens. Yacob (Steven Yeun), father of two children, David (Alan S. Kim) and Anne (Noel Cho), is driving an author from California. There is a wake-like silence, no one knows where they are going and Monica looks worried. When they arrive, the first thing they see is a large green field, which his children love, but his wife does not.

Director Chungtoma’s real parents didn’t know that their son’s film was semi-biographical, but the actors who played the dad and mom, Steven Yeun (Yacob) and Han Ye-ri (Monica), probably did. Well, to play the role, they had to connect with the desperate desire of two Asians who were looking for the American dream by bringing Korea to the United States through a farming venture.

David’s grandmother is the best cinematic symbol. A tender and eccentric company for two children who are very obedient to their parents, especially the 8-year-old, who wets the bed and has a heart murmur. She is the woman who pushes the young couple to a certain peace and balances the conflict, and who challenges the characters’ actions with her selfless and somewhat rebellious behavior.

This journey of a Korean family reproduces a new theme in the ceremony of the Oscar awards, or that is little addressed: Asian immigration. There are a large number of citizens who do not speak English in the United States, we know it. More than 41 million people communicated in Spanish at home in 2017, according to the country’s Census Bureau, and 1.1 million in Korean. But the experience of seeing “Minari” goes further, it is about embodying the feeling of belonging to a place while being a human being different from the rest.

THE LOVE THAT WEIGHTS

The flame of the drama is lit in three dramatic arcs, of the father, mother and son, because Mónica rejects the place where her husband insists on living. She wants to return to urban life, while he tries to realize his dream of creating a farm and raising his family from his position as “man of the house.”

They both work deciphering the sex of chicks on another farm near their home, but in their free time he tries to raise his crops accompanied by a Catholic man whom he hires with the family savings. With all this, their lives revolve around the unloving love of their marriage and the need to achieve economic status.

But, especially, the need to be the male figure of a family that rejected conservatism when it decided to live by its own rules and not those of Korean society, which can sometimes be restrictive with human ties: marrying for convenience, women in housework, work as a sacred duty, etc.

Although these issues are not touched on in the story, there is a traditional atmosphere of their own culture that they perceive as distant and, when the grandmother arrives, it is closer. You can perceive this through the child’s character, David (Alan S. Kim), who is the offender of looks, as he steals the attention in each of the scenes with his silent tenderness in sad and subtly laughable moments. .

In the style of Asian dramas, silence plays an important role in “Minari”. The rural part also accompanies those emotions projected by Yacob’s family, in such a way that happiness is defined as a matter of passing moments and unhappiness as pride and foolishness. The wife does not support the husband, the husband is selfish and the rest of the characters witness the couple’s storm.

But there are still other questions that your particular cinematic eye must discover and I will not continue printing the film, because the best part of “Minari“is that way of leading the viewer to an individual interpretation, without knowing much about where the idea of ​​the story is going, rather, letting the simple daily actions of the characters have multiple languages ​​and enjoying the story of a peasant house from the comfort of your home.

DATA

You can rent “Minari” in Amazon Prime Video at $19.99. It is a film that was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Golden Globes in February. It won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Festival in the drama category and ranks among the top 10 films of 2021, according to the American Film Institute.

In addition, actor Steven Yeun, Glenn from the “The Walking Dead” saga, is among the nominees for Best Actor at the 2021 Osca Awards, but his competition is tight along with Anthony Hopkins, Gary Oldman, Chadwick Boseman (who died in 2020 , but still participating) and Riz Ahmed.

THE TOKEN

Synopsis: A Korean family moves to a farm in Arkansas, United States, to start a new life and experience complex internal circumstances that lead them to redefine themselves as a family.

Duration: 1h 55m

Gender: Drama

Cast: Steven Yeun, Han Ye-ri, Alan Kim and Noel Cho.

Qualification: 13+

Year: 2021

Similar Movies: The Farewell, Little Forest, The Father.

Author rating: ★★★★

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