Little White Lies Issue 88: March/April 2021

Released 19 MARCH It’s obvious but important to note that Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari is as American a film as it gets. Set in the 1980s, on the cusp of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, it is the autobiographical story of a Korean-American family adjusting to life in Arkansas after moving there from the West Coast. It is, above all else, a story of faith and resilience, but also resistance to cultural and social assimilation. Like the minari plants of the title, which are able to thrive on even the most unlikely terrain, the members of the family at the film’s centre grit their teeth and start again. The struggle of rebuilding from the ground up is embodied by the virgin soil on the tract of rural land the family have just purchased…

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In a pivotal scene from Elia Kazan’s 1955 John Steinbeck adaptation, East of Eden, wayward son Cal Trask (James Dean) presents his father Adam (Raymond Massey) with a wad of money, earned from his wartime bean-growing business. The intention of his gesture is to win respect and affection. Adam, viewing the venture as a form of war-profiteering, refuses to accept the gift, and says, “I’d be happy if you’d give me something like your brother’s given me. Something honest and human and good.” Cal, devastated by what he views as another emotional rejection, wails as he tearfully embraces his shocked father, then flees the house. It’s a strikingly unvain performance from Dean, his anguish palpable enough that audiences might recoil, uncomfortable with such a naked theatrical display. But it’s real…

A IS FOR ALI We kick things off on a tender note, with one of the most romantic films ever made: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul from 1974. It sees the industrious German director channel his love of classic-era melodrama maestro Douglas Sirk into an homage of 1955’s 10-hankie spectacular, All That Heaven Allows. Where the earlier film saw a bourgeois housewife descend into social pariahdom after having an affair with her working-class gardener, Fassbinder switches things up by having an elderly working-class woman, Emmi, falling in mutual love with Ali, a strapping Moroccan labourer, much to the chagrin of her racist brood. Pointedly set in the aftermath of World War Two, the film deals with the complex fallout of that unholy episode, as Emmi admits to…

When Flower Drum Song came out in 1961, not much hoopla was made about it being the first studio-produced film centring on Asian-Americans with a predominantly Asian cast. Unlike the 2018 hit Crazy Rich Asians, whose publicity relied on the uniqueness of its Asian stars, Flower Drum Song was marketed primarily as a film version of the successful 1958 Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway musical of the same name. Moviegoers were thus promised a jovial time with a familiar formula and the added anthropological spice of Orientalism. As a result, despite the seemingly progressive casting choices, Flower Drum Song is a stereotype-riddled spectacle that offers little insight into the life and turmoil of Asian-Americans. Nevertheless, with its gorgeous production design, made possible by a $6 million budget, the film remains a…

As the author’s avatar in Lee Isaac Chung’s semiautobiographical coming-of-age film Minari, Alan S Kim does a lot of heavy lifting in spite of his slight, seven-year-old frame. A good chunk of the runtime follows his hardworking father and long-suffering mother, but young David carries the primary emotional arc as he acclimatises to his new surroundings in the patch of rural Arkansas his family has claimed as their own. In addition to the carefree ebullience that comes naturally to scamps his age, Kim is called on to telegraph such grown-up emotions as resentment, guilt and compassion. Most importantly, he has a clear sense of his cuteness threshold, the point at which adorable behaviour goes so sweet it runs the risk of sickening the audience. “I’m not pretty!” little David yells…