Minari: A vision of natural life

Author: Lei Jun, former professor of the Basic Department of the Military Economics College

In the mid-to-late 19th century, the Industrial Revolution deepened, and the United States ushered in the climax of urbanization. But with it, people's living space is squeezed and their freedom is deprived. So they began to return to the mountains and forests, to open up the wilderness, to seek new freedom and emotional salvation. The Korean film "Minali" was created in this context, focusing on the struggle of a Korean-American family to pursue the "American Dream". The film tells the story of Jacob, a Korean man, who moved his family from a California city to a remote and unfamiliar Arkansas state, and the twists and turns that occur in the process of running a farm.

Minari poster

In the 1980s, with the accelerated rise of modern urban communities in the United States, traditional forms of life and value orientations were abandoned. The development of modern cities has not only changed people's original way of life, but also monopolized resources with huge productive forces, and at the same time, the incomparably powerful destructive forces of cities have grown and destroyed people's original footholds - villages, wilderness, and past memories.

Man's freedom is nothing more than living according to his own will. The film "Minari" does not abstract human freedom, does not contemplate the purity of ideals in the art world, does not criticize the problem of social heterogeneity, but integrates the will of individuals to live freely into the wilderness soil, and integrates salvation into the real pioneering.

The film uses static realism to subtly hide conflicts in daily life. The Jacobs family, a Korean man, immigrated to the West Coast of the United States, where they were once a step-by-step screw in the city machine, enduring the repetitive tediousness of assembly line production in exchange for a stable life. Her husband, Jacob, advocated leaving California and gambling his fortune to come to arkansas farms to open up the wilderness, hoping to achieve his glory and dreams through hard work. Wife Monica longs for a good life in the city, and she wants a stable and warm home, not a fragile house built on a truck that can be blown by a tornado at any time. This also became the source of the constant quarrel between the two.

The natural differences between Eastern and Western cultures distinguish people from skin color, appearance, and language, but the hidden gap in culture cannot be fundamentally erased, and the attachment to past culture makes immigrants have instinctive cultural resistance. The rational face of the city put Jacob in the shackles of the spirit. However, the ideal of the city is nothing more than an extreme presentation of materialism, and in the face of the expansion of the city and the passive action, Jacob's sense of vertigo grows day by day, and in the end, he chooses to escape. However, life after escaping the city was far more difficult than he thought, and his wife was not used to everything here, so the two often quarreled. Later, because of the grandmother's help to watch the children, the unfortunate stroke made the family worse and came to the brink of division.

Grandma is an outlier to urban civilization, she is rustic, swear, play cards, let the roots of her hometown stretch in the exotic wilderness, gather this family that is about to be broken, and return the family to the structure of respect and inferiority. Compared to Jacob and Monica, who are trapped in life, Grandma lives freely. When her daughter was in trouble, she came to the United States with all her savings. Her arrival soothed the jacobs' anxieties and strengthened their confidence in life. Grandma has an independent sense of life, and there is dignity in independence.

The film does not put the city and nature at the opposite end of the confrontation, after all, the city dominates modern history and has become a new form of people's lives. However, the city also circles the radius of people's lives, restricts the projection of emotions and spirits to farther places, and the urban lifestyle drives people's homogeneous growth. The film praises the vitality and purity of the soul that nature brings to people's lives, and the simplest natural life form coexists with the complexity and reproduction of the city. However, the film also shows worries, such as how to face and deal with various sudden accidents and risks in life - grandma suddenly stroked, the home was burned down. In this regard, the film did not give an answer, and chose a compromise attitude of disposal, accepting the technical input of the city and the blessing of the gods in the natural wilderness.

Although minari's thinking on urban naturalization lacks the width and depth of the narrative, we can still feel the natural fragrance and tranquility of life brought by art, as well as the gentleness of green fluorescence outside the city street lamp. This is perhaps the most anticipated nectar and coolness for the crowd trapped in the urban desert. (Lei Jun)

Source: Guangming Network - Literary And Art Review Channel