Cow – first-look review

“Thank you for giv­ing your time to our cow,” said Andrea Arnold intro­duc­ing the Cannes pre­mière of her doc­u­men­tary, Cow. In coop­er­a­tion with the dairy and cat­tle peo­ple at a British farm, the direc­tor of such bruis­ing social real­ist films as Red Road, Fish Tank and (to a less­er extent) Amer­i­can Hon­ey has switched her focus to the hum­ble bovine for a fea­ture-length chron­i­cle that presents with­out com­ment the con­di­tions in which dairy cows live out their days.

Although there is a large ensem­ble cast, one cow – Luma – has been sin­gled out as the pro­tag­o­nist. She gives birth to a beau­ti­ful baby calf, aid­ed by birthing chains attached to the newborn’s hooves and heaved out by the farm­ers. The cam­era zooms in on Luma’s large pink tongue lick­ing yel­low birthing flu­id off her calf. The inten­si­ty of these shots frame an ani­mal that is ubiq­ui­tous-to-the-point-of-invis­i­bil­i­ty in a new light. Hand­held close-ups on demure brown eyes, long white eye­lash­es, heav­ing udders and hefty flanks drum up a sense of awe and respect for these docile creatures.

Cows are cen­tred in every shot, with human pres­ence ini­tial­ly reduced to sights and sounds that leak into the frame when milk­ing, feed­ing, herd­ing or oth­er­wise going about their cow-based busi­ness. The voic­es are affa­ble, the hands prac­tised and brisk. One feels that maybe this isn’t going to be a call-to-action film that shines a light on the hor­rors of the dairy indus­try. Per­haps instead a cin­e­mat­ic love let­ter to a cow?

The rap­ture of the focus on Luma and her pals in the cow barn leads to emo­tion­al invest­ment and the ques­tion: are they hap­py? Every aspect of their dai­ly life is gov­erned by humans: when they eat; how they sleep; when they have time to run free in a field; when a bull is brought into mate; when they give birth; when a vet has a hand inside them. Keep­ing the cam­era so close­ly trained on these pro­ce­dures invites empa­thy when a cow flails, when hav­ing its horns cau­terised or stands unnerv­ing­ly still in the met­al pens where they are kept flank-to-flank.

Regret­tably, to the untrained eye, one cow looks very much like anoth­er and there are times when the ensem­ble cast over­whelmed the frag­ile sense of a nar­ra­tive afford­ed by cleav­ing to Luma and her calf. There were stretch­es where I fever­ish­ly wished that this was an hour long doc­u­men­tary about a cow, rather than a 90 minute one. To her cred­it, Arnold finds humour through edit­ing, cut­ting from a shot of a bull mount­ing his mate – pink organ unsheathed – to fire­works explod­ing in the sky.

A mild sense of dread mounts as time ticks by. While there is a lack of direct edi­to­ri­al­is­ing, and the farm­ers are shown in an ami­able light, the sheer fact of the cows’ cap­tiv­i­ty, liv­ing to serve one spe­cif­ic pur­pose, trans­mutes an anx­i­ety over what will become of them. Strange­ly, for a film with a log­line that seems to be low on dra­mat­ic stakes, Cow feels like an Andrea Arnold pic­ture. There is a vis­cer­al appre­ci­a­tion for her help­less sub­jects that flows out of the film like spilled milk.

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