A ‘COW’ ON CANNES’ MENU: Film documentary generates empathy for animals better than Disney ever could
At the end of the day, Luma is reduced a product, herded from pens to fields and back again, and exploited to her fullest potential until that time is done.
ERIC KOHN: “Cow” opens with the closeup of a gooey calf yanked from the vaginal canal, and follows her all the way through her rough, solitary existence. The small miracle of director Andrea Arnold’s experiential documentary is that it enacts its simple premise in straightforward terms, but assembles them into a profound big picture. Her subject, a dairy cow named Luma, grows up under the tutelage of farmers who seem, for all intents and purposes, looking out for her best interests.
However, with Arnold centralizing her subject’s gaze, even their kindly background roles come into question. As Luma endures the monotony of her routine, “Cow” grows into a stirring, often sad contemplation of a life reduced to resources. Arnold apparently spent years filming Luma’s life, as she grew from calf to dairy cow, mated with bulls, and roamed with her herd…
It’s impossible to fully conceive of the world through the eyes of one animal, but “Cow” gets much closer than any anthropomorphized Disney character ever could, with the kind of sound and image deep dive that the term “pure cinema” was invented to describe…
The gamble of “Cow” isn’t exactly uncharted terrain. As recently as last year, the black-and-white odyssey “Gunda” delivered a wordless ode to the life of a pig and her ill-fated family… Arnold’s work borrows some aspects of these works but feels more intimately tied to Luma’s hardships, hinting at shades of a personality, even as it stops short of humanizing her. The cow is not a person. Instead, “Cow” invites humans to see the world as a cow…
Ultimately that takes the form of intricate details from her life. The unsteady slab of wood she’s forced to stand on while plugging into a milking machine, staring out at the mechanical sameness around her, encapsulates the frightening boundaries of her claustrophobic environment…
There are moments where “Cow” is on the verge of some grander observation before it doubles back to the cycle of circumstances that define Luma’s life… The experience settles into such an absorbing rhythm that its abrupt finale hits hard even if it’s inevitable from the start. At the end of the day, Luma is reduced a product, herded from pens to fields and back again, and exploited to her fullest potential until that time is done.
“Cow” doesn’t interrogate the motives behind that process — leave that to “Fast Food Nation” and its ilk — but it does a fine job of generating empathy from one scene to the next, and using that power to craft a hypnotic spell rife with significance. After all, what is life but a series of milking sessions followed by the dark void that awaits us all? “Cow” treats that question as a mission statement, stuns us into contemplation, and cuts to black. SOURCE…
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