Minari: taking roots

Minari is a beautiful film as any human life can be, but, as what happens with everyone else, dreams don’t always work out as they should. And this set of misadventures is told by the watchful eye of the six-year-old boy David (Alan Kim), a sort of alter ego of director Lee Isaac Chung.

The story begins with the arrival of David and his family in the rural area of a small Arkansas town. He, his older sister, Anne (Noel Kate Cho), and his parents, Jacob (Steven Yeun) and Monica (Yeri Han), will live in a mobile home (with wheels) on an agricultural property with fallow land.

While the expectation of harvesting typical Korean vegetables - to be sold to other Korean immigrants like them - is Jacob’s big dream, the idea deeply angers Monica who considers living in the middle of nowhere a threat to David’s health, that has murmur in the heart and cannot run or practice physical activities.

The couple work in the morning on a local farm, sexing chicks, and return in the afternoon to take care of the house and prepare the future plantations. Jacob hires an aide named Paul (Will Patton), a Pentecostal who spends all his time praying and casting demons off the property.

After several instances where the situation begins to become untenable between the couple, Jacob agrees to bring Monica’s mother - Soonja (Youn Yuh-jung) - to live with them. The arrival of this grandmother will introduce some cultural elements, but will add a delicious disorganization to the plot.

Going to sleep in the same room, David and Soonja fell out, he because she does not act like the other grandmothers and spends the day cursing, watching wrestling on TV and "smells like Korea". The elderly woman says that her grandson does not look Korean (in fact he was born in the United States) and should, contrary to what he does, practice physical activities.

Conflicts, unpleasantness and small tragedies follow and, in a way, we get used to the characters, as if we were part of the family.