Quaranstreaming VI

Featuring Minari and other movies that are less likely to get you to open the email

Watching

Minari (2020)

The “A24 film” is a curious artifact of our time, and also a bit of a sleight of hand. Of the just over 100 movies the company has distributed since 2013, it was a producer on only 14 of them. Thus the movies, for the most part, precede the company’s having anything to do with them; and while First Cow doesn’t have much in common with Gaspar Noé’s Climax in form, content, or (as far as I know) production conditions, as soon as A24 picks them up there’s no shaking off the association. When spoken endearingly, the term is meant to indicate a type of independent film seen to be on the cutting edge of independent, often boundary-pushing (but not too outré) and usually millennial taste; when spoken with disdain, it refers to the type of film that’s safer than it’s marketed as, oftentimes sold more as a brand ambassador than a film and consumed as one too. Whenever I hear the term I find it says more about the people using it than the movies themselves.

Minari is our most recent A24 film, though it began its public life in the halcyon days of January 2020, when it won both the Audience Award and Jury Prize at Sundance. It was written and directed by Lee Isaac Chung, who cites his childhood as inspiration for this 1980s story of the Korean American Yi family. The Yis have just moved from California to Arkansas at the behest of dad Jacob (Steven Yeun), who has a most American dream of capitalizing on the Korean immigration boom by starting a Korean-vegetable farm on untilled Southern land. The movie’s selling point—literally, he was the only member of the cast featured on the promotional poster—is 8-year-old first-time actor Alan Kim, as Jacob’s son David. Adorable and possibly fatally ill with a heart murmur, David supplies the movie with laughs and stirring emotional pathos, though stylistically the film doesn’t limit its point of view to just the youngest member of the cast. David has an older sister, Anne (Noel Kate Cho), who shoulders a lot of emotional burdens on the periphery of the story, and a playful nemesis in his grandma Soon-ja (Youn Yuh-jung), brought over from Korea in part to placate Jacob’s lonely wife Monica (Han Ye-ri).

Minari is above all a likable movie—it worked on me, at least—though I wouldn’t go so far as to call it (as one critic has) a Ron Howard movie hiding behind Korean dialogue. Nevertheless the naysayers raise an interesting point when they comment on the near absence of racial tension the Yi family encounters in this time and place. Most of it comes from the kids at the (very white) church the family attends: not psychologically harmless by any measure, but treated by the movie mostly as an opportunity for a nervous laugh or clenched jaw. It’s odd to think of a movie that ends with a tragic fire as overly romantic, though I do think the film is indulging in a rosy image of the past by underselling the stubbornness and severity of anti-Asian racism in the U.S. Why, just a few days ago we watched Minari pick up a Golden Globe for best foreign language film, the only award the Hollywood Foreign Press Association deemed it fit to compete for.

In an early bring-your-child-to-work scene at the chicken-sexing factory where his parents work day jobs, David asks his dad why the plant has a smokestack. Jacob tells him euphemistically that because the male chickens don’t serve capital they need to be discarded. I wonder what male chickens Chung got rid of in the process of writing this movie; I wonder if there would have been any place for them in an A24 film.

The Remains of the Day (1993)

While I was reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1988 novel I wrongly imagined Michael Caine in the role of Stevens, the neurotic butler and poster boy for the sunk cost fallacy. It was Anthony Hopkins in the movie, but don’t you agree that would have been good too? Like pairing a different kind of wine with dinner.

The Merchant-Ivory film production of the book is, like their other adaptations, unfussy and engaging. The presence of Miss Kenton (Emma Thompson—I didn’t have her in mind per se but there’s a very oh yes of course quality to that casting choice that I heartily endorse) is foregrounded in the movie such that her unfulfilled romance with Stevens through the years becomes obvious whereas Ishiguro prefers to keep it understated.

In my reading of the book, Miss Kenton was only a spectral presence. Despite being ostensibly the reason for Stevens’s trip into the countryside, when he finally arrives most of their visit is recounted after the fact. In the scene where Stevens’s father dies during a convention of the Greatest Minds in Western Europe®, I pictured her appearing as out of thin air to deliver the news. He can’t let himself just be present with her even only in his memories—one in a long list of examples of measures Stevens has taken (knowingly or otherwise) to keep from confronting himself. The movie gets us to this conclusion but Ishiguro’s unique achievement in the book is to yoke us to Stevens’s psyche from start to finish. The camera pulling back in aerial retreat from Stevens and Darlington Hall as the movie comes to a close brings the viewer a certain relief that the novel—which ends with Stevens sitting on a bench, lost in thought without realizing just how lost he is—cruelly withholds from both him and us.

Some Films by Angela Schanelec

My Sister’s Good Fortune (1995)
Passing Summer (2001)
Marseille (2004)
Afternoon (2007)
The Dreamed Path (2016)

Even after marathoning most of her movies last month I still don’t know how best to describe Angela Schanelec’s work. It feels insincere to describe them by summarizing their plots, either because it’s impossible or irrelevant. Sometimes the images are striking, like the 10-minute-long close up near the start of My Sister’s Good Fortune where a man breaks the news to his girlfriend that he has decided to leave her for her sister. But even that description is inadequate. The scene starts after the key information has been disclosed, so what we’re attentive to is less the direction of the plot than what Schanelec is training us to notice by how she frames her actors: their physical closeness in spite of where their relationship is headed, the way the man, blubberingly emotional, rocks back and forth in frame, how the woman studies her lover from temple to chin.

In the twenty years following that film (her first feature), Schanelec would try out a number of recurring themes and scenarios, acting in many of them herself. Brittle family ties, unrequited loves, performance (Schanelec got her start in theatre); scenes starting and stopping at unexpected moments; editing that revels unexpected bodies and mundane revelations. My favorite example of the latter is an edit in Afternoon: after a man has been talking to his offscreen mother for a minute or two, Schanelec cuts to reveal the mother, legs draped over the side of an armchair, played by none other than Schanelec herself.

2016’s The Dreamed Path is both recognizable as a Schanelec film and also a major departure. It’s the first film she shot digitally (it shows) and the first in 15 years where she has an editing credit. The raggedness of her filmmaking is even more radical than before. With barely any explanation the movie opens with a German couple busking by a bus stop on vacation in Greece (their chosen song is The Lion Sleeps Tonight; let nobody accuse the Germans of humorlessness). Decades appear to pass and tragedies pile up for both of them, though the lead female character wears the exact same red shirt and striped skirt through it all. At a certain point the movie abandons the two leads altogether to follow another, totally unrelated woman and her family’s problems for a good half hour or so. Moves like these can really try your patience but the payoff— in this case, the return of the first woman as a flash of red seen by the audience through the rear window of the second woman’s car—is unexpectedly gutting.

I’ve found that when a filmmaker creates something truly mystifying like this, they’ve thought long and hard about it, whether you the viewer like what they’re doing or not. In a journal she kept while filming Marseille, Schanelec confirms my hunch:

I don’t want to explain anything, only report, like Walter Benjamin says: “present events, as it were, dry, draining them entirely of psychological explanations and opinions of every sort.” They should speak sentences like involuntary gestures, sentences that they know nothing about and whose sound, should they even become aware of it, would surprise them. But how should I describe this without knowing about it myself? I should let myself be written.

The Murder of Fred Hampton (1971)
Judas and the Black Messiah (2021)

Fifty years ago, the Chicago production company The Film Group set out to make a documentary about the city’s chapter of the Black Panther party. Halfway through the shoot, chapter leader Fred Hampton was murdered and the production pivoted to an investigation of his death and the legal handling of it. You can watch the whole film for free on Vimeo; it’s a half hour shorter than Judas and the Black Messiah, which I watched, to the newer film’s detriment, on the same day.

I don’t have much to say about Judas. I was more distracted than usual while watching it, mostly by my thoughts about how the earlier film’s availability ought to be more of a story. I know where the draw for a Hollywoodized version of the story comes from; people are more likely to watch the shinier object with faces they recognize, and to be fair, with its action set pieces and evocative cinematography Judas goes down easily (to be less fair: maybe too easily).

I agree with the consensus around the casting. First: Martin Sheen as J. Edgar Hoover—wild! More importantly: Fred Hampton was only 21 when he was killed, not 30 like Daniel Kaluuya who plays him here. Sure makeup and costuming can make Kaluuya pass for a…let’s call it a vision of 21, but you notice that he looks the same age as most of the people he shares space with. He’s saying all of Hampton’s words, but the extra decade on Kaluuya’s body changes their impact. We’ve seen older civil rights leaders in Hollywood films before; it’s the young ones whose stories still ask for remembrance. I think Jamelle Bouie put it best: “The effect [casting older actors] has is to diminish what’s most appalling about the stories of O’Neill and Hampton—that they were little more than children, manipulated and murdered by their government.”

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Reading

Wilfred Chan scrutinizes Nomadland’s depiction of its real-life nomads for Vulture:

What kind of film would Nomadland have been if the real nomads’ perspectives had been front and center? Amazon warehouse workers have reported walking up to twenty miles a day on concrete, carrying goods across massive warehouses while trying to beat a digital-countdown timer, with no benefits for CamperForce recruits besides a stipend to help cover campground fees. Near the end of Bruder’s book, Linda May offers a blistering take on Amazon, with a clarity that’s completely omitted from her performance in Zhao’s film: “I hate this fucking job,” she says, calling the company “probably the biggest slave owner in the world.”

There has been a lot of good writing on Minari, and I myself didn’t even cover everything that’s going on in it to make it interesting. If you’re in the market for more, I commend to you Kristen Yoonsoo Kim, Eve Tushnet, and Isaac Feldberg.