Minari

Minari, the movie was seen. It impressed, impacted and lingers till yet. Its growing up, captured and presented in a way that invokes a longing. We've been there, our own versions of it. 

For me, family, particularly my father, my journey with him begins with a sound. A scrunch that sounds like SCRUNCH. 

The first time I remember my father's footsteps was in the gravel at Goregaon. We had just moved from our hometown Lucknow.  Bombay was alien. The people, the sounds, the scale, the buildings, the neighbours, the flats. 

My father was sailing before the scrunch. I remember sitting on his bags, knowing it would be about 6-9 months before we saw him again. This bag sitting might have made quite an impact on him because I was pretty much home (ship) schooled till they deemed a class room necessary to my life. 

When we used to take walks as a family after dinner, dad would be walking, with that unmistakable scrunch. And i really had to plant my foot, twist it to extract a scrunch. It felt to me the sign of the ground validating you walking on it. My dad walks the earth, his shoes scrunching in recognition. 

The movie deals with these very elements of nature at its purest, primal existence. The American dirt, the threatening typhoon, the water woes and ofcourse, we end with the fiery lord itself. 

To be noted is who causes the fire. The unusual but usual suspect was the "not real" grandmother. 

How the daughter weeps meeting her amused mother after so many (how many?) years maybe only seems emotional on the daughter's part. Then you meet the person that the G.mom is. She's living agelessly. I feel she would have been the same in her 30s or 50s. Comfortable. Not that she doesn't bring the Korean deer antler medicine for her grandson's heart murmurs. It is the pinnacle of medicine from her time and place. Ofcourse she has it on her. Though her true grandmother-ness revealed not through the fresh baked cookies her grandson keeps expecting her to produce, but through the exuberant, expletive laden card game. The Yin Yang sunrise-sunset art on the cards seemed to signal the cyclical nature of the cards we are dealt and the attitude one should have while playing the "game".  

The foreshadowing in the film. Its done so well. Don't know what else to say. The bedwetting to the pee soup masquerading as "mountain water". Leading to the "not real" grandmother's stroke. Revealed with the bedwetting. Right after she envelopes her grandson in her cocoon of joi de vivre. 

The Minari she plants, it is the seed of hope she sows for her family. 

Plant your minari. Around it will be a life that will be sacred, untouched, yours. Like your own Walden Pond. Around it will grow your life in an elemental way. The earth, the wind, the water and the fire.