Minari

Mary had for some time been intermittently and half-heartedly advocating that we watch Minari, a 2020 film about a Korean family that moves to Arkansas from California in the early 80s to found a farm and get out of the drudgery of working in poultry mills "sexing" chickens (i.e. distinguishing useful female chicks from useless male ones, which are incinerated. I'm guessing this is for egg producers). It's a good not great film, slow, focused on tension between the spouses about being out in the middle of nowhere, with additional plot tension furnished by a son with a heart defect and the wife's mother, who's a bit of a wild one: cursing and generally being coarse, playing cards with a verve atypical of a grandmother, etc. It's to the director's credit that the film doesn't really build out and elucidate the grandmother's deviance from the norm. We have to infer here that the wife comes from something like peasant stock so that achieving a veneer of bourgeois respectability is important to her. At least that's how I read it. Though she never really criticizes her mom. It's the kids who are a little baffled.

In an atypical move, Mary laid down on the couch after we had finished eating our dinner (a chicken soup with nian gao and bok choy that I had made and was pretty tasty and needed after weeks of eating tons of bread, cheese and ham in Europe). She hasn't really laid back like that for a long time while watching. So often she's clutching her phone scrolling the Instagram, the Times or the Post when we take a bathroom break or the plot slows. It was good to see, took me back to our early days, before cell phones had become the center of the universe.