This may be a personal issue, but there’s something about Andrea Arnold‘s brand of wallowing realism that never quite brings a point to its misery. Premiering out of competition at Cannes, Cow is Arnold at her barest: wordless, plotless documentation of the day to day lives of two dairy cows. Purely observational, its a parallel to humanity that’s left quite shallow in its loose ideas of violence and exploitation.
There appears to be some attempt at aligning a feminist allegory to the cow footage. The cows are met with gendered violence, a calves horns are burned off not long after birth, the female cows squeeze out dripping wet children, take a farmers arm repeatedly inside of them, and are rubbed raw by the milking process. This cold documentation best works at a cow’s-eye view, where some empathy is established, but the metaphor falls flat in the intense minimalism of the film. Nearly all of her previous work approaches questions of consent, usually through sudden violence, and what appears to be a sequence of attempted mating shows this same image of force repeating, a nod to the human characters of her other work.
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The filmmaker’s love of pop music permeates here, with Kali Uchis on the playlist the dairy farmers play as they work. They are hardly in the frame, blurred arms at the edge of the screen, as the focus is on the animals. This isn’t a bad thing, there’s just so little narrative constructed from any of it. Cow is at its best when the most lucid, softly faded closeups of the bovine stars in a field eating grass, where there is at least a nice visual. At its worst is where Cow tries to play itself as an exploitation film, lingering on the pained animals hoping to create a bit of shock horror on an English farm, but instead looking like someone forgot the audio track on the annual celebrity-narrated pro vegan movie.
The problem with so many of these British social ‘realists’ is their unending desire to wallow in so-called poverty porn, They’ll obsess over the details and disenfranchisements, almost celebrating when things go wrong, and forget to build any sort of character. Such is the issue with many recent Ken Loach films, and most of Arnold’s work, and she tries to avoid this by bypassing any human story.
Perhaps Cow is an odd test as to how loose arthouse film can go without any experimentation. Its high quality camera version of a barn security camera leaves the ideas it wants to present unremarked on, relying on a specific type of viewer to empathize with her cattle. Even as someone who has gone years without eating meat after looking the local cows in the eye for too long… the end effect is just dull. So little is done to elevate any of the material from the exhibit cams zoos use that the best explanation for Cow is that its an inside joke wondering what audiences will rave over just as long there is a respected cinematic name attached.
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