If there was one movie that wowed critics and audiences at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival it had to be Lee Isaac Chung’s beautifully sweet and simple “Minari.” So much so that last night it won both the Audience and Grand Jury Prize — a first for a movie since 2016 and Nate Parker’s “The Birth of a Nation.” Based on the director’s own upbringing in the 1980s as a seven-year-old Korean American boy, the film has on-screen father Jacob (Steven Cheung) disapprovingly moving his son, David, and daughter from the West Coast to rural Arkansas with frustrated wife, Monica — she’s irked by the relocation to a mobile home in the middle of nowhere. Troublemaker David and his sister are bored by the vast plains, but have their lives quickly disrupted when their grandmother arrives from Korea to live with them and set the family dynamic straight again, but life gets in the way, and things don’t go as planned. Meanwhile, Jacob passionately wants to use their 50 acres of crop to open his own farming business of Korean vegetables, throwing the family’s finances in danger, his marriage out of loop, and the stability of the family into freefall. Chung tackles the American Dream with the highs and lows of this Korean emigree family. There are shades of Ozu’s bittersweetness here, ditto the perceptive nature that made the Japanese master’s films so indelibly memorable. Each character is fully sketched by Chung, who throws episodic melodrama at his audience to tell his story. A film like “Minari” getting overpraised could be dangerous to its overall impact. Make sure to go into this film fully aware of its simple but substance-filled frames. The lack of any showiness is, in fact, part of Minari’s charm. Whether it can build up an audience upon its release this summer is still up in the air due to the aforementioned subtleties, but this is a film whose every scene was carefully chosen by its director. [B+]
Another double whammy happened in the NEXT section when Heidi Ewing’s passionate gay romance “I Carry You With Me” ended up winning the NEXT Audience and Jury Prize. An effervescent mood piece with incredible relevance, Wing had originally set her sights for the film to be a doc about its two subjects, but when she couldn’t complete it, she decided to tell her story through, mostly, fictitious lens. Set in Mexico, Wing tells the true story of aspiring chef Iván, hoping to land a spot in the kitchen while supporting the mother of his child, and Gerardo, a teacher who, unlike Iván, is not closeted about his homosexuality. However, once they are discovered as lovers and he is no longer able to see his son, Iván makes the arduous trek to cross the border with the promise of the American dream at his disposal. Ewing returns with her solo directorial narrative debut. This bittersweet American Dream is based on an acclaimed New York City chef, whose cuisine pays homage to his beloved country. Lensed by the impressive and fast-rising Mexican cinematographer Juan Pablo Ramírez, Iván’s memory is rendered indelible, making Iván’s predicament of not being able to return to Mexico all the more heartrending. The film is a tender romance and a complicated journey beautifully captured. [B+]
A little less subtle was Edson Oda’s “Nine Days,” which is already getting love/hate reactions. This wildly ambitious, but pretentious, narrative feature won the screenwriting award, but if its watered-down simplified philosophy about life and death may work for some, I found it completely nauseating to sit through. Occurring in some pergatory-like place where people’s souls make a pit stop between life and death, Will (Winston Duke) heads a program to choose who will go on and be born with life and who will ultimately fall by the wayside. The candidates have nine days to prove their worth to Will. The Brazilian-born Oda is filled with ideas, albeit rather clunky ones, and in his feature directing debut chooses to go big or go home with his story, a metaphysical jaunt into a Bresson-inspired unknown. Sure, a movie like “Nine Days” must be commended in its unadorned artistic aim for the skies, but the execution is rather clunky. Will, haunted by the apparent suicide of one of the souls he granted life to, does his “soul searching” in an isolated cabin in a dessert-like Utopia. It’s there where he watches lives unfurl, via VHS tapes no less, on old-school TV screens. You’d think such an advanced world, able to grant breathing life to individuals, would have better technology at its disposal. [D]
I can confirm that Joel Coen’s “Jack of Spades” is based on Frances Frederica Montrésor’s 1901 novel “The Alien: A Story of Middle Age.” It’s a ghost story. A gothic mystery.