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“Minari” and the Asian-American Heart
In an interview, Korean-American director Lee Isaac Chung said that in writing the screenplay for Minari he was inspired by a quote from Willa Cather, the Pulitzer Prize winning American author of My Ántonia, who said that her life really began when she stopped admiring and started remembering.
The first shots of Minari spell out Chung’s personal and intimate orientation towards film making. We start with a close-up of David Yi, the son, who is looking forward. From his perspective, we see his mother Monica driving and his sister Anne reading. Notably, the father character Jacob is not with them.
Rather, he is driving ahead of them in the moving truck, which coincidentally bares Willa Cather’s name. We see Monica look at her daughter who is looking down, and David turns his head sideways to watch the countryside and the title screen. The scene is nice, with hay bales and cows and green forest — for a certain kind of audience, the environment is nostalgic.
When the family drives up to the house, David gets up and looks puzzled. Monica looks pissed. The first thing the children do when they leave the car is look at the foundation of the house, which support it in the air. Jacob stands above his wife, trying to…
