BEFORE: Here we are, at the halfway point for Movie Year 18. Though can I really call anything a halfway point when I've been doing this for so long? Halfway to what? It's just another year, after all - what an exciting year it's been already, and still there are miles to go before I sleep. Just kidding, I sleep all the time, but usually I crash just before the end of a movie. Maybe I sleep too much, but can you ever sleep too much?
Willem Dafoe carries over again from "Inside", that's four films for him if you count "The Phoenician Scheme" from January, and I have to - so he'll make the year-end countdown for sure, and so will Emily Watson, who gets her third appearance tomorrow as we head into Father's Day weekend. I think I saved the most relevant father-based material for that, but we'll see. I think tonight's film qualifies, too.
THE PLOT: In a remote village on the island of Carpathia, a girl is raised to fear an elusive animal species known as ochi. But when she discovers a wounded baby ochi, she escapes on a quest to bring him home.
AFTER: Sure, plenty of father-clashing going on here in this film - Yuri is a teen girl who's been raised by her father, Maxim, to hate and hunt the Ochis. She doesn't get to REALLY participate in the hunt, because that's work for boys and men. (Down with the patriarchy!) He gives her a token Swiss Army knife, but come on, the boys have guns and spears, how's she going to defend herself with a pocket knife? The real insult comes when Maxim talks about how the Ochis "stole" his wife, preventing him from having the son he always wanted, so he adopted Petro, who was orphaned at a young age. Clearly Maxim prefers his pseudo-son over his real daughter, maybe some people can relate to that.
So who can't see the rebellion coming? Yuri realizes that the Ochi creatures are not vicious, they're just misunderstood, and this creates the chasm between her and her father. Look, if it wasn't this, it was bound to be something else - like clockwork, when we're teens we usually end up rejecting everything our parents stand for, whether that's their religion or their profession or their hobbies, at some point if our goofy Dad is into it, we want no part of it. Relatable. So Yuri takes off with the little ochi she rescued on a mission to return it to its family, its mother was killed but maybe she can get the little one back to his tribe.
I'm not going to lie here, there's an amazing similarity between the ochi and Grogu from "The Mandalorian". Just going to put that out there and mention that the "Mandalorian" TV series came first, but this film predates the "Mandalorian" movie - make of that what you will. But at least I'm getting to both movies within the same month so I can compare and contrast. In the first two seasons of the Disney "Mandalorian" series, there was an attempt to figure out what Grogu was and maybe get him back to his people, whether those people were Jedi or his own species, and it took a while, but eventually it came to pass that your family is the armor-clad bounty hunters you meet along the way, not some Jedi that are halfway across the galaxy, let's say.
So we kind of expect nothing less here, as Yuri's escape from her father puts her in peril, but also back in touch with her estranged mother, who has not only been studying the Ochi and their lifestyle and language, but she secretly already taught it to Yuri years ago, in the form of flute music. So Yuri has a unique ability to learn the trilling language of the Ochi, in fact she already knows it, which is maybe just a bit too convenient. The convenience factor also comes into play when we're dealing with a fictional animal species, it can be whatever the director wants it to be - cute, friendly, sometimes vicious, and with a "language" all its own. Who's to say this couldn't exist, except for the fact that we know that it doesn't, anywhere in the world?
The symbolism of the "lost bird" is clear - if a bird leaves its nest, and is taken in by humans, if it returns to its old nest, it could be rejected by its parents, because it has the "smell of man" on it, and therefore by extension if a person runs away from home, or say, goes away to college, they can never really return home to their parents without some form of problems, because they've seen a different part of the world, they are no longer the same person and they won't see their own parents the way they used to, nor will the parents see their child in the same way.
The symbolism of the "lost bird" is clear - if a bird leaves its nest, and is taken in by humans, if it returns to its old nest, it could be rejected by its parents, because it has the "smell of man" on it, and therefore by extension if a person runs away from home, or say, goes away to college, they can never really return home to their parents without some form of problems, because they've seen a different part of the world, they are no longer the same person and they won't see their own parents the way they used to, nor will the parents see their child in the same way.
This is a very different, unusual film, and I usually try to reward that - however the conflict between the animals and the girl's father is rather by-the-numbers when you get right down to it, so naturally I'm torn here. It's very original except for the parts that seem like every other lost animal saved by humans kind of story, like "Born Free" or "E.T." In the end, this felt like a monster film made by Wes Anderson, if he were to make a monster film it might be all weird and twee like this is, and Willem Dafoe would definitely be in it, front and center.
My biggest problem was trying to understand the things Yuri was saying, the actress has a distinct strong accent that made it hard for me to know what she was saying - remember that I'm half deaf in one ear. So when it got really bad I had to switch from the DVD I made (with no captions) to watching the last half of the film on Hulu (with captions, ah, so THAT's what she said...). But sure, cast foreign people to speak English with a thick accent, that won't make things difficult for viewers at all!
Directed by Isaiah Saxon
Also starring Helena Zengel (last seen in "News of the World"), Emily Watson (last seen in "On Chesil Beach"), Finn Wolfhard (last seen in "Saturday Night"), Razvan Stoica, Carol Bors, Andrei Antoniu Anghel, David Andrei Baltatu, Eduard Mihail Oancea, Tomas Otto Ghela, Eduard Ionut Cucu, Zoe Midgley, Stefan Burlacu, Emanuel Stoicescu, Andreea Mustata, Gabriel Spahiu, Pulu Mircea Lascus, Victoria Dicu, and the voices of Paul Manalatos, Alexandra Dusa, Ana Maria Cucuta, Alexandru Condurat, Anna L. Coats.
RATING: 5 out of 10 geese and cats missing from the farm.
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