Directed by: Andrea Arnold
Academy Award winner Andrea Arnold returns with an intimate portrait of
one dairy cow’s life. The film highlights the beauty and challenges cows
face, and their great service to us all.
Cow is Scottish filmmaker Andrea Arnold's first documentary,
among her five brilliant feature films, but it is still very much an
"Andrea Arnold" film. Arnold's features, even her literary adaptation Wuthering Heights,
have each used a cinema verite-adjacent approach, where a naturalistic,
character-driven narrative immerses us into each character's psychology
and then beautifully seeps out into the overall tone and experience of
the film. Her camera operates without judgment -- we observe and feel
with her characters, even in their morally dubious choice, and to watch
one of her films is to be immersed in a uniquely empathetic experience.
Her documentary Cow uses the same kind of empathy, intimacy,
observational, naturalistic style, except here, Arnold's subject is a
real dairy cow, not a fictional human being, and we follow the cow's
day-to-day life on a working dairy farm to its most specific detail. The
camera is fully our guide, and while we sometimes overhear
conversations among the farm workers, our focus is fully on Luma, the
cow, and we experience life, over the four years Arnold filmed from her
point of view. The effect is a kind of radical empathy: there are Luma's
eyes, a frequent center of focus, which seem to speak in ways literal
speech cannot do; there is the profound ache as Luma's calves are, after
birth, immediately taken from her; there is the heel-kicking joy of
being let out to the green sunny spring pasture, after confinement in
the winter barn. There is only one moment, near the end, when we are
abruptly removed from Luma's experience of the world, and while I will
not give away the ending, it is worth noting that Andrea Arnold is never
one to shy away from the brutal realities of the real world. It is a
gentle film in many ways, beautifully dignifying Luma's life and
experiences, but Arnold, while never didactic, has made a film where I
think it will be difficult to consider cows and the dairy products we
use, in quite the same way again.