Upon initial viewing of Minari, I quickly noticed the atmospheric sound that has become somewhat characteristic of A24 Films (Lady Bird, The Farewell). However there was something more musically implicit that was taking place beyond the foreground screen and speakers. In moments, the sounds swept and rose to express an impressive range, while also being emotionally evocative. Behind all this is multi-instrumentalist Emile Mosseri, who had his breakthrough with scoring The Last Black Man in San Francisco in 2019. His appealing songs, composed upon piano, are embellished with a 40-piece string orchestra outsourced from Macedonia and rounded off by wordless vocals. The soundtrack encapsulates and conveys the shifting vicissitudes of the Korean immigrant Yi family in their attempt of establishing a family farm in Arkansas during the pre-Farm Aid eighties.
Writing the score from Lee Isaac Chung’s script allowed Mosseri to stretch out without preconceived notions. With this process, the score takes on its own unpredictable and unexpected identity, while also fitting the film. The music expresses the theme of eeking out a livelihood hinged upon the precariousness of nature against a constantly fluctuating agrarian economy-along with a sub-theme of the variegated roles of religion in both Korean-American and Southern cultures. It could even be maintained that Mosseri’s score even carries and propels the film. The soundtrack also achieves a balance of presenting an overall sound alongside standout individual pieces-thus clearing the common trapping of soundtracks becoming nondescript after the main theme (in order to serve the film). This concision and definition could be partly attributed to Mosseri’s extensive background in rock and pop.
Farm to Turntable
“Garden of Eden” has almost an exotica quality and is presented with a lushness that belies the quotidian and incessant demands of tending to the earth. Sung in Korean by lead actress Han Ye Ri, “Rain Song” is an invocation to mother nature to summon the life-giving rains. These spacious songs offer bucolic hope, while confronting the deeply entrenched economic patterns and a hardscrabble land with a sense of determination. This musical encapsulation of hardship and hope is fitting for a film which presents a countervailing take on the prevailing diaspora narrative of East Asian/Korean settlement along the coasts.
The stately “Big Country” and hushed “Jacob’s Prayer” are at times evocative of early Sufjan Stevens-if not the maestro himself Ennio Morricone. As heard on the trailer, the stirring “Birdslingers” enters with a bold marching cadence and wordless vocals which effectively conveys the dramatic elements of the film with verve before yielding to an extended piano outro. This most inherently grounded piece also presents Mosseri’s most memorable melody of the soundtrack. With ethereal echoes of “Watermark”-era Enya, Kim Jung Mi, and even Joe Meek, “The Wind Song” is sung in Korean by the aforementioned Han Ye Ri and unfolds in wide-open naturalistic fashion while being carried along by a detuned 1943 Gibson L-2 acoustic and wavering theremin-like gusts generated by a 1984 Korg Monopoly synthesizer. The soundtrack succeeds both at expressing the fuzzy, jumbled and blurred-around-the-edges impressionistic nature of childhood memories along with the shifting concepts of settlement & transience and embracing the foreign and the familiar. At times, Mosseri’s otherworldly score transcends its liminal space & time to connect the temporal and repetitive with the elusive eternal. Overall, this recording elevates and establishes Mosseri as one of the most adept and striking film composers currently working in the field.
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