Cow

dir: Andrea Arnold

2021

I think it’s kinda disingenuous to call this a documentary, but then I can’t think of what else you would call it. A woman called Magda Kowalczyk, the cinematographer, follows around a cow for about a year, from about the time she gives birth to one calf, and up to just after she gives birth to a second calf.

Of all that footage, the director Andrea Arnold in concert with 3 other editors, has fashioned a movie that aspires to give the viewer a sense of the experience of not what it’s like to work on a dairy farm in Kent, in England, but of what it’s like to be a cow on a dairy farm in Kent.

That’s a hard task to set oneself. There’s no voiceover, no narrator explaining to us what we’re seeing or what we should think about it. We overhear a bit of conversation between the vet and the workers on the farm about the cow, about how they’re recovering after the birth, that sort of stuff, but if we consider the cow herself to be the protagonist, we have to imagine what she’s thinking and feeling, because she’s not going to tell us.

This probably sounds quite dull. I actually found watching the film quite fascinating to watch. It seems like mighty hard work daily on a dairy farm, but the people working there, mostly young women, don’t seem to find it too onerous. It seems a bit hard on the cows, but we don’t see them being mishandled or mistreated.

We see the birth of the calf, from the beginning, a tremendously gross and sweet moment, where the mother licks the poor thing clean, until it can eventually walk enough to be separated from its mother. The mother moos quite loudly at the calf’s absence, or at the presence of the person with the camera in her stall, and we wonder (or at least I wondered) whether the mother feels the calf’s absence profoundly. She does seem quite upset.

Is that what we do? Do we project our thoughts and feelings onto these creatures, to try to make sense of their existence, but only in ways that are completely self-serving to us? I probably spent 90% of the movie doing exactly that and questioning it extensively.

Though a name is given later on, or maybe I wasn’t listening carefully enough early on and missed it, she is referred to as Luma. But to me, because I sometimes struggled to differentiate her from the other cows, I recognised her by looking for three things, depending on which angle she was being filmed from: from up front on the right side of her neck she had two white star-like patterns (so in my mind for much of the movie I was saying to myself “is that cow Two Star or not? Oh, yeah, there they are”). Also, she had a pattern on her side that looked a lot like, or at least reminded me of the classic Misfits logo.

And from behind, though most cows look the same from behind, she had the numbers 29 and 11 branded onto her arse, so alternately to me she was 29 11, Two Star or Misfit.

Anyway, what a pointless explanation when the cow’s name was Luma.

What does a name mean to a cow, anyway?

She lives her existence. She is often milked, along with the other cows. We see her treated for various things, in various ways. How her hooves are ground down with a handheld orbital sander, but also the massive metal contraption she has to be locked into in order to hold her safely on her side but not risk her health or the safety of the staff working. A cow falling on you would do a fair amount of damage.

The milking process is wild. Once they’re locked in to their stalls, and the claw-like suction device is attached to their udders, the whole enclosure slowly starts rotating, as pop music plays dreamily. The only soundtrack in the film is what is called, in serious filmwank terms, diagetic sound, as in, sounds and music that occurs then and there, nothing put in, in post-production, like a soundtrack. All the music we hear is coming from a radio. Is it for the workers’ benefit, or for the cows?

We watch the time pass through seasons for Two Star, but also for her calf, who grows rapidly. They do some harsh looking procedure on where the horns would come out from, cauterising them in some way. I don’t think it hurts the calf at all, but it doesn’t look like fun.

The mud, the muck, well, it’s their environment. In what look like the warmer months, the cows are let out into pasture, and seem quite content, eating grass (prior to this we mostly see the adult cows eating grain, the calves receiving milk, but through customised plastic and rubber devices), and seeming to enjoy the glories of nature. Again with the projection, but I suspect the filmmakers know this: They know we’re going to do this, in fact their art is in provoking it.

I’ve left out that much sooner than you would have thought was proper, Luma is set to have another calf, and we watch that process with the brought in bull in all its opposite of glory. But afterwards, Luma rests her head against the bull’s neck, and we wonder what she’s feeling, whether it’s close to the feeling we call contentment, or maybe just relief?

The contentment we feel, or imagine, that’s most profoundly there in the twilight-shot pasture scenes, because maybe for a few minutes we wonder whether this is about as good as it gets for these cows, and especially for Luma.

After she has her next calf, though the birth goes fine, we sense, or at least I felt like something was wrong. She is milked with difficulty, but her udder never seems less than engorged, and even walking seems difficult. She is suffering and I don’t know why.

And then. Something happens so brutal, but so obvious, that I felt betrayed.

I got over it eventually, and have forgiven the filmmakers, because I understand, or at least I think I understand where they’re coming from. This is not a flick aimed against the dairy industry, or dairy producers. It’s not about animal cruelty or the excesses of the agricultural sector. If anything all those people the camera never focusses on seem to take excellent care of the creatures in their care.

But a dairy farm shows the circle of life and death even more profoundly, and more prosaically than any nature doco set in the Antarctic or the Serengeti narrated by Lord Attenborough about nature red in tooth and claw. On a working dairy farm life and death are woven into the everyday tasks that never stop, are ever ongoing. It doesn’t seem like an easy job, nor an easy life for the cows, but as domesticated creatures, what else are they going to do?

I have loved some of Andrea Arnold’s earlier work, like Fish Tank or her take on Wuthering Heights, which was superb, but I very much respect what she and the other makers have done here. This is definitely one of those “great” films I watch once and never again, but I applaud the artistry of what has been put together here in ways that could not have been easy, over a long time frame. Even without an explicitly vegan agenda, though, it’s pretty hard to feel like this isn’t an indictment of such a massive industry.

But again, maybe I’m just projecting. The director herself has avoided telling people in interviews what her actual stance is, because she wants people to work it out for themselves.

This is not an easy watch, because there are long stretches, unedited, where “nothing” is happening, and those hungering for a linear, easily explained narrative will be left wanting. But in its way it’s quite remarkable.

Cow. Not a sequel to that great Nicolas Cage film from last year called Pig.

8 times that ending was heartbreaking out of 10

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Moo - well said - Cow