We’ll get to the film at hand in a moment, but first—and just briefly—there’s no getting around the controversy that’s all but dominated the first couple of days at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. It began, really, when the festival announced its lineup, as two titles in Competition, Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) and Bong Joon-ho’s Okja, are Netflix originals. The company had planned to stream both in France without theatrical releases. French cinema owners protested, Netflix arranged a few theatrical screenings, and Cannes declared that, as of next year, all films in Competition must also eventually open in French theaters.
“The protest speaks to the heart not only of the French film industry but also of French national identity,” notes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. “France has long adhered to the idea of cultural exception—that culture should not be treated like other goods—to protect its audiovisual sector from the ravages of the free market, which has often put the country at odds with the United States. It’s an idea that has affected world trade negotiations and sparked debates over globalization, a nation’s cinema and diversity.”
On Opening Day, jury president Pedro Almodóvar and fellow juror Will Smith clashed over the necessity of theatrical presentation—Eugene Hernandez has a full account for Film Comment—and Almodóvar felt his comments were misconstrued. “Not me nor any member in the jury will make any distinction between the two Netflix films and the rest of the films in competition,” he tells IndieWire’s Anne Thompson. “We’re here to judge artistically the 19 movies that the festival has selected. We have said so before, but I want it to be clear.”
Alright, then. On to Okja. “How can this movie’s producer—Netflix—ever be content with just letting it go on the small screen?” asks the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw. “Apart from everything else, the digital effects are spectacular and the visual images beautiful. It’s a terrible waste to shrink them to an iPad.” Five out of five stars.
Little White Lies’ David Jenkins suggests that Okja “plays a bit like Lassie Come Home inter-bred with Frederick Wiseman’s eye-watering food processing documentary, Meat. After all the heartache that Bong went through with his exceptional previous, Snowpiercer, it’s heartening to see that he’s turned his back on the standardized Hollywood production line and is looking for new ways to attend to the world’s global hunger for great cinema. And in many ways, that’s exactly what Okja is about—it’s Bong in dialogue with himself, picking apart the future of the medium, and looking for new and logistically feasible means of expression. All with the help of an enjoyably brash script written by British journo Jon Ronson.”
“The pantheon of crushingly lovable cinematic creatures needs to clear a very large alcove, and lay on a good supply of fresh persimmons, for Bong Joon-ho’s Okja, the eponymous, enormous, hippo-like ‘superpig’ whose covalent bond with her human best friend could pulverize the hardest of hearts,” writes Jessica Kiang at the Playlist. “This is the visionary, genre-bending Korean director’s most broadly accessible film ever, not just because it’s largely in English, and not just because its so full of fun and mischief and adventure. It’s also because it’s a relationship we recognize from the other children’s classics to which it easily compares (E.T. being the obvious touchpoint), and possibly even, if we were very lucky kids, from our actual childhoods.”
“A rollicking rescue movie with deep ache and hope in its heart, Okja feels like just the right story for this grim political moment,” finds Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson. “It’s something of a clarion call to those resisting the creep of various -isms—capitalism, totalitarianism, fatalism—without succumbing to sanctimony or sermonizing. It’s also funny and thrilling, chock full of masterfully constructed set pieces that spin and chase with dizzy brio.”
At ScreenAnarchy, Pierce Conran calls Bong “a master of twisting something new out of the familiar” and sets the scene: “In 2007, the Mirando Corporation, run by the highly eccentric and publicity-crazed Lucy Mirando [Tilda Swinton], sends 26 superpigs to farmers across the world, beginning a ten-year long competition to crown the Best Superpig and bring it back for a celebration in New York. When the time comes, 14-year-old Mija [An Seo Hyun], living high in the mountains in the Gangwon Province of South Korea with her grandfather, is torn from her best friend Okja. Not willing to let her friend go without a fight, she chases after her across the globe and finds herself caught in a struggle between the diehard activists of the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the corporate soldiers of Mirando.”
“Tilda Swinton and Jake Gyllenhaal’s performances as corporate baddies set on turning giant pigs into lucrative bacon are much less fun than they should be,” finds Time Out’s Dave Calhoun. “Gyllenhaal's turn as a narcissistic, crazed animal expert is especially over-ripe and grating. . . . Visually, this is a classy affair: Darius Khondji’s photography enhances rural and urban locations alike. But the pig-chasing antics and cartoonish corporate nastiness that dominate much of the film become seriously grating.”
“There are suggestions of Bong’s great monster movie The Host, but, if anything, Okja is brasher, madder and less connected to everyday reality,” writes Donald Clarke in the Irish Times. “About Jake Gyllenhaal’s awful, high-pitched nails-on-a-blackboard turn we will say no more than he manages the feat of not giving the oddest performance in a film that also stars Shirley Henderson. No matter. The film around him is a mad pleasure.”
“The film is packed with so many strange gems of moments, and while a few feel like Bong losing the plot (specifically any time Okja decides to loosen her bowels) it always snaps back together,” writes Emily Yoshida at Vulture. “By the time Mija and [Paul] Dano’s crew find themselves at a hellish slaughterhouse, Bong’s no longer messing around, even if the victims in question are CGI hippos. For all its wackiness, Okja is also a deeply humane film.”
Also at Vulture, Kyle Buchanan lays out an argument: “Netflix spent $50 million on the effects-laden project, but I can’t imagine a conventional theatrical release would have recouped: You’d have to go wide and spend tens of millions more to even entice people into theaters, and the movie is just too weird to survive that kind of thing. . . . While the French may jeer Netflix, there’s no question that few other places would have let Bong Joon-ho execute his vision just as he’d wanted.”
More from John Bleasdale (CineVue, 4/5), Peter Debruge (Variety), Eric Kohn (IndieWire, B+) and Steve Pond (TheWrap).
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