Minari — what does it mean to grow wherever you are planted? Is it an act of resilience? Is it a loss of identity? Is it the rejection of one place that birthed you in favor of another that you build for yourself?
Lee Isaac Chung’s ‘Minari’ offers no easy answers to any of these questions, but his film is a moving portrait of love and frustration, of isolation and the instinct to care for the people we love, all told in warm, golden scenes that altogether evoke the feeling of an endless summer afternoon.
Quiet, moving, and deeply personal, ‘Minari’ is one of those films that doesn’t quite punch you in the gut as much as seeps into your skin and hangs onto your clothes like old bitter tea.
It’s also one of the very few films I’ve seen that addresses cultural ambiguity with such tender precision: when Jacob and Monica spoke in Korean and their children answered back in American English, the language they were most comfortable with, I felt an unraveling in my gut. It’s a subtle, delicate, moment, but filled with the kind of tension that sparks fires when left unattended for too long.
