FILMS
FILMS
Bovine larceny in 1820s Oregon; Ben Wheatley’s return to folk-horror roots; it’s a pig’s life and more…
In The Earth: Reece Shearsmith playsa different kind of eco-warrior
FIRST COW By inclination a miniaturist, Kelly Reichardt isn’t necessarily what you’d think of as a great director in auteur upper case. But she’s one of the most individual and incisive voices in contemporary cinema, whose vision becomes richer and more complex film by film. After eco-politics drama Night Moves and character portmanteau Certain Women, Reichardt’s First Cow returns to the unmapped margins of the western, which she previously explored in 2010’s pioneer drama Meek’s Cutoff.
Set in backwoods Oregon in the 1820s, First Cow is a tragi-comedy about friendship and survival. It concerns two men who provide each other with shelter from a brutish world: quiet ‘Cookie’ (John Magaro), who’s having a miserable time providing victuals for a party of trappers, and King Lu (Orion Lee),a Chinese immigrant getting by perilously on his wits. Forming a close bond, they set up shop selling ‘oily cakes’ – fritters with a secret ingredient, milk stolen from the one cow in the vicinity. The tactic proves risky when the English official in charge of the local settlement (Toby Jones, pricelessly self-important) develops a taste for the sweetmeats.
Here the film takes on a brittle comedyof-manners tone, set against the raucous edge of frontier life. Known for depicting women’s experiences, Reichardt here looks at masculinity – but of a more vulnerable kind than you usually associate with the Old West. This focus echoes Old Joy – her breakthrough film, set in the Oregon wilderness – and First Cow recaptures that film’s attention to landscape, with a tactile evocation of leaf, branch, mulch and mud. The lead duo are superbly empathetic and often very funny in their fond, taciturn interplay. First Cow tells a quietly devastating story but, typically for Reichardt, it leaves you with unresolved questions and unresolved feelings to mull over – or should that be ruminate? – long after it ends.