Andrea Arnold, British director of thrilling cuts like ‘Fish tank’, ‘American Honey’ or his own version of ‘Wuthering Heights’, said that with ‘The Cow’ he can let go of all the dramatic tension with people and Capture the daily life of a cow on a farm as if it were a candid and close story.
Arnold also the purity of the documentary. There is not a single interview in his movie, no didactic scenes about how a cattle farm works. Women and men get a full background. Arnold focuses on the cow with the delicacy of the documentarian who does not interfere with what he is shooting. And so it takes a movie that is as captivating as it is intenseaway from sound and human presence.
We see the cow give birth to a calf, eat, recover to be milked again, clean its hooves, visit the vet, have a new mating and die. The life and death of an animal in an hour and a half.
We also see the calf in some of the images until it is transferred to another farm. The ability to capture close-ups – how patient must be shooting this movie! – Expressions of expressionless animals are expressive. The film flows with a naturalness that surpasses even some of the human fictions that the director has seen in his previous films.
‘Cow’
Gender Documentary
Year 2021
premiere April 8, 2022
★★★★