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Friday, April 23, 2021, 11:00
Old wine in new (and old) bottles
By Elizabeth Kerr
Friday, April 23, 2021, 11:00 By Elizabeth Kerr

Minari, written and directed by Lee Isaac Chung. Starring Steven Yeun and Han Ye-ri. USA, 115 minutes, IIA. Opens April 22. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

There is absolutely nothing wrong with movies that are familiar. Georges Polti’s theory that there are only 36 narratives in art feels truer each passing day. Which is not a bad thing, necessarily. Romeo and Juliet is a classic for a reason. The same can be said for some of the most popular modern genres: the rape-revenge fantasy and the immigrant story. At the end of the day, it’s all about the kind of filter a filmmaker runs those familiar stories through.

We talked about Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman back when online screenings were the only option. Now out in cinemas, Fennell’s scathing, Oscar-nominated slap-down of rape culture and the toxicity that insulates it is far from perfect, while being bold, subversive and polarizing in the best way. The story is a simple one — about 30-year-old Cassandra (Carey Mulligan, demonstrating a heretofore hidden range) avenging a friend’s sexual assault. Fennell, who previously worked as a writer on Killing Eve and played Camilla Parker Bowles in The Crown, effortlessly skewers all the moving parts in our world that allow sexual assault to flourish and, more crucially, points a finger at the so-called nice guys who don’t realize their own complicity. Fennell walks a razor’s edge between feminist rage and education, without ever leaning on a shotgun.

Promising Young Woman, written and directed by Emerald Fennell. Starring Carey Mulligan and Bo Burnham. UK, 113 minutes, IIB. Opens April 22. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

Similarly, the immigrant story is a well-worn narrative in American cinema. Movies about new arrivals to the land of the free, striking out to grab a piece of the fabled brass ring, are nearly as old as cinema itself, and form the foundations of everything from gangster epics (The Godfather series) to absurdist comedy (Ben Sharrock’s Limbo). 

Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari — also an Oscar-nominee produced by Brad Pitt’s Plan B, whose credits include winners 12 Years a Slave and Moonlight — is cut from that same cloth. However, the semi-autobiographical film is as traditional in its construction and recognizable in its messaging as Promising is not.

The Walking Dead’s Steven Yeun plays Jacob Yi, a Korean immigrant in 1980s California who uproots his wife Monica (Han Yeri, Secret Zoo), daughter Anne (Noel Kate Cho) and son David (Alan Kim) to move to Arkansas in the southeast US because true freedom is in owning land and making something of yourself on it. Or so goes the theory of the American Dream. At one point Monica’s mother, Soonja (Youn Yuh-jung), moves in to help out. Farming doesn’t work out, but Jacob has his family. The End. 

As well-acted and humanistic as Minari is, it doesn’t add much that’s new to the conversation about the immigrant experience in the United States. Even now, the film is gaining traction as (seemingly) radical shifts in race relations emerge globally, but its fundamental ordinariness seems at odds with the zeitgeist, and Chung’s gentle approach makes it tricky for the story to leave an impression of any kind. A lot of what could make it more engaging — the long shadow cast by Reaganomics, or Koreans heading to the white heartland, for example — would have helped Minari transcend its genre.


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