tsvetoslav shalev

Earlier this year, after seeing the trailer of Minari for the first time, I decided to share it with my mother and get her thoughts on it. Much to my surprise, she inquired if the movie was available to watch that very same day, a desire she voiced time and again over the weeks that followed. Her face always hung, the voice carrying a hint of displeasure and bewilderment, whenever I reported the absence of the movie from Amazon Prime. When it was finally up for rent, at a cool £9.99 GBP, she didn’t even question the price tag, surprising me yet again with her eagerness.

The making of something beautiful out of the mundane, the ordinary, the humdrum is an enviable skill to me. Watching Minari for the first time is like drinking an unsweetened herbal tea – strong and pungent, so plain as to appear almost pellucid, a bit bitter yet cleansing, warm enough to melt the thick chunks of ice in one’s stomach. For that is where the heart is, period. However, of all things, I never expected this experience to rekindle memories of old, the life of the family so reminiscent of that of my own. Images and sounds so entwined in the psyche, my parents’ many a failed attempt at making something of themselves with hard, honest work and no small amounts of fervent praying and superstition. I still recall the long hours spent in my father’s Fiat Regata, the unbearable heat and the overpowering stench of black coffee, cigarette smoke, and sweat, as we hauled goods from a neighbouring city to our grocery store. Or the hundreds of boxes with countless baby chicks lining every available space on the first floor of the house, the daily racket consisting of ‘peep peep peep’, small, clawed feet shuffling around, the pecking of so many beaks, while light seeped through the windows in the kitchen, yes and the living room and even my grandmother’s bedroom. We sold bikes, watches, and Tamagotchis, co-owned a bar and ran the aforementioned grocery store, but the final nail in the proverbial coffin was a thousand tree apricot garden that withered on the year we were supposed to harvest for the very first time. For a while, my father stayed at the old shack where a guard was stationed to keep an eye on the land, returning home occasionally to take a shower or grab something to eat. In my eyes, I saw a man defeated, still fighting only he knew what, but he never admitted it was so. He was and still is of the mindset that sincere actions cannot possibly result in a personal failure. It had to be fate, a powerful force, Nature, ill intent, not of one’s own errs. Oh, and the unconditional love of my grandmother, transformative in hindsight, not once taken for granted, never repaid in full, I don’t think. Banal, all of it, don’t you think? But it really happened, to us and to so many others, until someone decided to make a movie of it.

My mother needed 3 glasses of wine and some nervous pacing around to help her digest what was happening on the screen. While I was already raising my invisible walls, bracing for the impact of a deep and upsetting crescendo, she was on the edge of the recliner, bemoaning what both of us expected to be an unhappy ending. The story of Minari concluded on a positive note, much to my mother’s relief, hence the lightness, the freshness I alluded to earlier. Now, as I sit here in my dark corner of unfulfilled wishes and recall these moments, I realize that our own story is yet to reach its finale. I can only hope, that my quest for optimism will deliver, but that’s the inner solipsist talking.