Minari. Love is for everyoneChinese-American director Chloé Zhao (b. 1982) rounds off a trio of minority social realism in the USA. She has grown in her independent filmmaking and in the harvest of awards: first with Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015), then with The Rider (2017), and finally with this picture of labor nomadism in the American West, following a sexagenarian woman who takes to the road to get her life back together.
Film file
In 2011, the closure of a building materials factory causes the exodus of the already minimal population of Empire (Nevada), turning the town into a ghost. Also the protagonist, Fern - a disheveled Frances McDormand, who is vying for her third Oscar - stocks up a van and goes nomadic with temporary jobs wherever she can get them. She runs away melancholy, ready for anything. We learn who she is and what happens to her through nights and days on wheels, with or without work, on the road or parked, on lonely walks or in lively conversation in a real nomadic community. The film, adapted from a book, does not follow a classic script, it begins on the road, it misleads, and it is not until the end that it fully expresses the true grief on wheels of this sociable woman who resists loneliness.
The vital refuge of the protagonists, especially hers, omits the transcendent and personal God. Instead, it appeals to human immortality, not just memory, and evokes the renewal attainable to the human heart through simple work, the love of nature - so many sequences whose magic lies in Joshua James Richards' photography and color, accompanied by Einaui's music - and, of course, the care of our peers: those fruitful exchanges of Fern and her colleagues, providential or untimely.
Chloé has confirmed her habit of giving a role to someone who has never been a professional actor; and in this one, the gentle and attractive old woman Linda May stands out. Does Zhao like to show that cinema gives us life itself, and life itself becomes a great cinema? In fact, his camera loses no detail, and follows the characters when they wake up early or sleep, and even settles in the not at all intriguing intimacy of the bathroom, like an angel from behind. Nothing in vain for Nomadlandwhich won an unprecedented double, Best Film at the Venice International Film Festival and the Audience Award at Toronto. It also won two Golden Globes 2021: best film (drama) and best direction. The climax was the night of the Oscars. It won three Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director and Best Leading Actress.
The director is working these months in post-production on a non-stop action film that breaks with her track record. If she succeeds in turning Marvel's tortilla around again, she will have gained expertise in special effects, direction of a great lineup of actors and quite a few dollars. The eternalThe Chinese Zhao, a kind of immortal, are to save mankind. With them, the Chinese Zhao, who had so far brought ordinary people from remote reservations in the USA back from the ashes, becomes a national director with strategies to save humanity. Star-system and superpowers.
Minari. Love is for everyone
