米纳里

“Minari,” Reviewed: A Strangely Impersonal Tale of a Korean-American Boy in Arkansas

《纽约客》评《米纳里》

【本文首发于《虹膜》公众号】

By Richard Brody

February 10, 2021

来源：https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/minari-reviewed-a-strangely-impersonal-tale-of-a-korean-american-boy-in-arkansas

作者：Richard Brody

译者：覃天

校对：易二三

来源： 《纽约客》（2021年2月10日）

Sometimes technique is so showy that it overwhelms a movie, but there’s also technique that dominates by flaunting its modesty. That’s the kind on display in “Minari,” Lee Isaac Chung’s quasi-autobiographical drama about growing up, as the child of Korean immigrants, in rural Arkansas, in the nineteen-eighties. (The film “opens” online for two weeks at Film Forum and at A24’s virtual cinema, starting Friday.) As a result, what’s original, particular, and personal in the story gets reduced to the familiar dramatic conventions used to tell it.

有时，在一部电影中，技巧过于炫耀，以至于压倒了电影本身，但也有电影通过技巧来让自身的谦逊占据主导地位。李·以萨克·郑的准自传电影《米纳里》给我们展示的，就明显属于后者，这部电影讲述了20世纪80年代，韩国移民的孩子在阿肯色州的农村成长的故事。（从周五开始，这部电影将在电影论坛和A24公司的虚拟影院线上「上映」两周。）因此，导演将电影中原创的、特别的和个人化的东西简化成了人们熟悉的戏剧冲突。

As a young boy, David Yi (Alan Kim) moves from California to rural Arkansas with his family—his older sister Anne (Noel Kate Cho) and their parents, Monica (Yeri Han) and Jacob (Steven Yeun). In Arkansas, they live in a mobile home propped up on blocks amid a large tract of vacant land, which Jacob plans to turn into a farm that will support them. But the new surroundings spark a confluence of family conflicts—some that arise, and other, longstanding ones that are quickly exacerbated. For starters, Jacob seems not to have made clear to Monica that they’d be living on an undeveloped and isolated property, and in a mobile home.

小时候，大卫·易（阿伦·Ｓ·基姆饰）和他的家人——他的姐姐安妮（诺埃尔·赵饰）和他们的母亲莫妮卡（韩艺璃饰）和雅各布（史蒂文·元饰）从加州搬到了阿肯色州的乡村。在阿肯色州，他们住在一大片空地上的一座活动房屋里，雅各布计划把那里变成一个养活他们的农场。但是，新的环境引发了一系列问题——一些家庭冲突开始出现了，另一些长期存在的家庭矛盾则迅速加剧。首先，雅各布似乎没有向莫妮卡明确表示，他们将住在一处未开发的与世隔绝的房产上——也就是活动房屋里。

Monica and Jacob have long been at odds over money—they have been in the United States for a decade but have little to show for it. (This, he reminds her, is because, by Korean tradition, he, as his parents’ eldest son, has had to provide for family back home.) In Arkansas, both Jacob and Monica work as chicken sexers at a hatchery—that’s what Jacob did in California, and he’s considered exceptionally good at it—until he leaves to get the farm started. Jacob has long been bored and frustrated by his repetitive, monotonous labor, and his dream of the farm is as much a matter of independence and creative energy as it is one of profit. David was born with a heart murmur and requires frequent monitoring (he isn’t even allowed to run), and, in case of an emergency, the farm’s great distance from the nearest hospital worries Monica. In their new home, she’s angry, frustrated, and desperately lonely; though there are a handful of Korean immigrants in the area, she hardly connects with them. So to give Monica companionship, and to help with child care, the family brings her widowed mother, Soonja (Yuh-jung Youn), over to live with them.

莫妮卡和雅各布长期以来一直在钱的问题上争执不下——他们已经在美国生活了十年，但几乎没有什么表现。（雅各布提醒她，这是因为按照韩国传统，他作为父母的长子，必须养家糊口。）在阿肯色州，雅各布和莫妮卡都在孵化场做雏鸡的性别鉴定员——雅各布在加利福尼亚州就是这样做的，他被认为非常擅长这项工作——直到他离开去开办农场。雅各布长期以来一直对他重复、单调的劳动感到厌倦和沮丧，他对农场的梦想既事关利润的问题，也牵涉他的独立和创造力。大卫生来就有心脏杂音这种疾病，需要经常监测（他甚至不能跑步），而且在紧急情况下，靠近农场的医院又很远，这让莫妮卡十分担心。在他们的新家，她感到愤怒、沮丧、绝望和孤独；虽然这个地区有少数韩国移民，但她几乎没有与他们建立联系。因此，为了陪伴莫妮卡，并帮助照顾孩子，这家人把她丧偶的母亲顺子，也就是大卫·易的外婆（尹汝贞饰）带过来和他们住在一起。

Soonja’s arrival transforms David’s life. She is wise and loving, gruff and tender, profane, impulsive, and fiercely devoted to her bright and burdened grandson. Meanwhile, Jacob’s efforts to start the farm are greatly aided by a neighbor named Paul (Will Patton), an effusive, awkward Christian mystic who, when the spirit moves him, speaks in tongues. A gregarious hermit, Paul is something of a local laughingstock, but he is a knowledgeable farmer; he quickly befriends Jacob and offers his experience and labor. (It’s never made clear whether he’s paid or merely lending a hand.) Jacob’s enthusiasm for the farm makes him overweeningly optimistic about his endeavor. In quest of a place to dig a well, he repudiates the services of a dowser—he boasts that “Korean people use their heads”—only to risk losing his entire crop when the well he digs runs dry. That arrogance sets in motion a chain of misfortunes that start small and end up catastrophic.

外婆的到来改变了大卫的生活。她聪慧，慈爱，脾气暴躁却也温柔，世俗而冲动，十分喜爱她那阳光、同时负担累累的外孙。与此同时，雅各布开办农场的努力得到了一个名叫保罗（威尔·帕顿饰）的邻居的极大帮助，保罗是一个热情洋溢、略显笨拙的基督教神秘主义者，当上帝感动他时，他会说一些没有人知道的语言。保罗是一个爱交际的隐士，在某种程度上，他在当地的就是一个人们口中的笑话，但他还是一个知识渊博的农民；他很快就和雅各布交上了朋友，并提供了他的经验和劳动。（目前，我们还不清楚他是拿到了钱，还是只是帮了个忙。）雅各布对农场的热情使他对自己的努力过于乐观。为了寻找一个挖井的地方，他拒绝了一名探矿者的服务——他吹嘘说「韩国人用自己的双手，我们用头脑思考问题。」——结果是，当他挖的井干涸时，他可能会失去全部庄稼。这种傲慢引发了一连串的不幸，开始时很小，结果却是灾难性的。

The movie takes note of the business of farming, but only glancingly; it delineates family relationships and bonds with townspeople in quick, sharp touches. Its sketch of the parents’ marriage resounds with quietly painful confrontations. But most of the best things in the movie, arising from Chung’s fine and subtle sense of observation and the ardor that he brings to them, are undercut by their presentation. The movie’s anecdotes and observations may be personal, but they are filmed with an utter lack of subjectivity—whether from the filmmaker or the characters. History is winked at, with glancing references to the Korean War, once by an American character and then by a Korean. Otherwise, the movie is a blank framework that pre-organizes the story to the essential information needed for the plot and the significant character traits that explain it. The movie (and, by implication, the memorious observer, David) never gathers a rich and varied enough range of perceptions to suggest a lived-in depth of experience or idiosyncrasies of character. This is a familiar style, an academic realism of calculated understatement that maintains its restraint even in the midst of terrifying events and grave danger.

这部电影留意了农业生意，但只是粗略地描述了家庭关系和与镇民的纽带——以快速、尖锐的笔触描绘了这一点。它对父母婚姻的描绘，充满了安静，痛苦，对抗的回响。但电影中大多数最好的方面，来自李·以萨克·郑细腻的观察力和他给他们带来的热情，却被他们的呈现所削弱。这部电影的故事和观察视角可能是个人的，但它们的拍摄完全缺乏主观性——无论是来自于导演还是电影中的人物。电影里，一次是一个美国角色，然后是一个韩国人顺口提起了朝鲜战争，不过真正的历史好像被遗忘了。除此之外，这部电影就是一个空白的框架——导演将故事预先组织成情节所需的基本信息和解释它的重要人物特征。这部电影（或者通过导演暗示的，也就是记忆力很强的观察者大卫的视角）从来没有收集到足够丰富和多样化的观点，来暗示深刻的经验或性格特征。这是一种熟悉的风格，一种刻意轻描淡写的学术现实主义，即使在可怕的事件发生时，以及严重的危险中也保持克制。

The narrow and merely illustrative drama is matched, unfortunately, by an impersonal cinematography that fails to suggest texture or intimacy. The images depict what’s in the script, not the characters’ lives; between the scenes, neither the characters nor the story seem to exist. As for a sense of place, it’s approximate: locations play like sets, with neither a sense of space nor a sense of touch; the landscape is reduced to a few illustrative shots. The actors are both charismatic and talented (Yeun, of course, is the best known of the cast, and Youn is a veteran of many of Hong Sang-soo’s films and of Im Sang-soo’s “The Housemaid”), yet here their performances are contained; they bring out the logic of the story without allowing emotion to expand idiosyncratically beyond it. Despite the charm and nuance of Youn’s performance, her role is drawn from a deck of clichés not unlike those of Glenn Close’s character in “Hillbilly Elegy.” The result is to turn particular experiences general, to render strange ones plausible, exceptional ones average.

不幸的是，与这部狭隘的、仅仅是说明性的戏剧相匹配的是一种非个人化的摄影，它未能暗示出质地或亲密感。这些图像描绘的是剧本中的内容，而不是人物的生活；在场景之间，人物和故事似乎都不存在。至于地点的感觉，它是近似的：地点像布景一样发挥作用，既没有空间感，也没有触觉；风景被简化为几个说明性的镜头。演员们既有魅力，又有才华（当然，史蒂文·元是演员阵容中最知名的，扮演外婆的尹汝贞是出演过洪常秀的许多电影和林常树的《下女》的老戏骨），但在这里，他们的表演受到了限制；他们带出了故事的逻辑，而不让情感溢出故事的范围。尽管尹汝贞的表演充满魅力和细微差别，但她的角色是一个陈词滥调的人，与格伦·克洛斯在《乡下人的悲歌》（2020）中饰演的角色没有什么不同。其结果是使特定的经历变得普遍，使陌生的经历看似合理，而不寻常的经历变得平淡无奇。

For a movie centered on a child’s experience (David is far more prominent in the action than Anne is), “Minari” oddly neglects curiosity and wonder, fantasy and terror. The strongest moments in the movie are the few that evoke the anxious shadows of David’s view. One day, he overhears his mother explaining to his grandmother that he’s in danger of dying. That night, before going to sleep as usual, in the bed next to his grandmother’s, he asks whether he’s going to die, and she dismisses the fretful prayers and rites with which his mother has raised him as foolish. (When she tells him to stop worrying about Heaven, he asks, “But what if I go to Hell?”) They’re the scenes that come closest to suggesting the blend of gravity and innocence, of fear and the fear of its expression, that makes the child’s inner life deep and strange and singular. Elsewhere, Chung’s teeming recollections and extrapolations are muted by the reductive conventionality of their depiction. “Minari”’s style is a disheartening example of the gravitational pull that such conventions exert on the cinema at large.

作为一部以儿童经历为中心的电影（大卫在片中的情节要比安妮多很多），《米纳里》奇怪地忽略了好奇心、惊奇、幻想和恐惧。电影中情感最强烈的时刻，是少数几个能唤起大卫焦虑阴影的时刻。有一天，他无意中听到他的母亲向他的祖母解释说他有死亡的危险。那天晚上，大卫在像往常一样，在外婆旁边的床上睡觉前，他问外婆，自己是不是要死了，而外婆对烦躁的祈祷和宗教仪式不屑一顾，她认为大卫的妈妈把他变成了一个傻子。（当外婆告诉大卫不要再为进入天堂而忧愁时，大卫问道：「如果我下地狱怎么办？」）这些场景最接近于暗示庄严与纯真、恐惧与对其表达的恐惧的混合，这使得孩子的内心生活变得深刻、奇怪和独特。在其他部分，李·以萨克·郑丰富的回忆和推断因其描述的简约性而变得平淡无奇。《米纳里》的风格是一个令人沮丧的例子，说明了这样的传统对整部电影施加了巨大的压力和影响。