From Lee Isaac Chung, American director with South Korean roots, born in 1978 in Denver (Colorado), we mainly knew the first feature film Munyurangabo, a humanitarian fiction filmed in Rwanda, which, in 2007, made its way to the Cannes Film Festival, then on French screens. With Minari, his last openly autobiographical inspired feature film, which passed through the Sundance box in 2020, the author draws on his childhood memories to tell the story of the establishment of an immigrant family on American soil, and weave a new variation on this founding theme of American thought that is “the pursuit of happiness”.
In the 1980s, Jacob Yi (Steven Yeun, seen in Burning de Lee Chang-dong), a farm worker, leaves to settle with his wife Monica (Han Ye-ri) and their two children on a small piece of land lost in the middle of the plains of Arkansas. He thus hopes to escape the laborious chick sexing work to which he was until then confined, and to grow his own vegetables – in this case the exotic ones prized by the Korean community. But his wife does not see it so well when she discovers the shabby mobile home they must now live in, inherited from a suicide farmer, far from all commercial and hospital facilities. Their son David (Alan Kim), a chubby toddler, indeed suffers from a heart murmur that arouses their full attention.
A dream against and against all adversity
Minari, after the name of a Korean aromatic plant, is thus declined as a family chronicle of re-rooting, which is also chronic of “becoming American”, a dream pursued stubbornly, against and against all adversity, by the father of the family. If Chung fully plays the card from the allogeneic point of view, by making the majority hear the Korean language and its thousand transfers with English (a bias of realism not common in American cinema), he especially adopts that of the little boy, who repaints adventure according to the golden legend of childhood. Hence the agrarian work which does not always escape the chromo, and a figure of the father mythologized in the effort and a very idealized integration within the rural population, yet described as bigoted and backward (but full of good feelings) .
More convincing are the care and attention with which Chung describes the relations of the small clan, its tensions and its ups and downs, such as the arrival in its womb of a wacky and badly mouthed grandmother (the formidable Youn Yuh-jung, faithful to Hong Sang-soo films) which frightens the little boy. In a somewhat blissful way, the story is tied to the question of faith. At first refusing the help of a dowser to dig a well, Jacob will come up against the threat of drought and the exorbitant price of the federal supply network to carry out his operation. Integration will be at this price: leave your pride behind to gain access to local beliefs. Becoming an American is therefore not understood here other than as a way of making a “profession of faith”.
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