"First Cow" by Kelly Reichardt.
Someone look at you like Cookie (John Magaro) look at the first cow that comes to that border land of Oregon. Year 1820. The first dairy cow arrives in that "cosmopolitan by some standards" territory, he says. Kelly Reichardt, the director of First Cow, . "There were people from Russia, South America, England, Spain, Hawaii and China, along with the many tribes and bands that lived along the river and had used it as a trade route for ages." But there were no dairy cows.
We are in Orgegón in the Lower Columbia area, “the stretch of river from the ocean to where the Willamette River meets the Columbia, which is n currently located in Portland. That area has been inhabited by people for at least 12,000 years.” Before Oregon became a state, it was a lawless territory of pioneers, of hustlers, of fortune seekers exploiting natural resources, hunting beavers and bears in its lush forests to sell them around the world. The paradigm of the Far West. But they had no dairy cows. To that place comes Cookie, a nomadic cook, a man out of his time, who did not fit into that brutality and dirt, but who looked at that cow with love, seeing in her the secret of sweets and desserts that he learned in another life in Boston.
The first cow arriving at his new home.
Encouraged by his unexpected friend, King-Lu (Orion Lee), a Chinese immigrant whom he met in the middle of the forest, naked, fleeing a murder, they decide to milk this new inhabitant, owned by the local landowner, at night, furtively. And later, for the day, They sell buñuelos with honey and cinnamon in the market. The brutish trappers and hunters go mad with that bite "that is made with the taste of home". For King-Lu and Cookie, it is the beginning of a prosperous business, even if it is based on a deception.
First Cow (Theatrical release Friday, May 21) It is based on the novel by Jon Raymond, although only in a small part of that book in which there was not even a cow. For Reichardt, the cow is a moral guide, it allows us to look with distance and identification at what we do in this world. First Cow is a portrait of the roots of those USA built on the work and identity of immigrants and natives. It is an explanation and critique of that initial capitalism. “Can capitalism coexist with the natural world? Can both coexist? The director, one of the most respected independent filmmakers, asks her characters and also the viewer.
Her characters meet her answers, rooted forever in that land where the American dream was born. Hand in hand, we want to think that they would not have succumbed to what would come years and years later: that enormous ship that crosses the screen (in square, intimate, claustrophobic format) slowly but relentlessly at the start of the film, before a woman find two buried skeletons.
King-Lu and Cookie, friends from the first cow.
landscapes, animals, friendship they are a sacred trinity already in Kelly Reichardt's filmography. In First Cow there is a lot of her previous films (Old Joy, Meek's Cutoff, Wendy & Lucy). Always shot outdoors, out of necessity first, now for pleasure. The story of this first cow, of these first steps in the American destiny needed a camera attached to the ground that looked more at the feet of its protagonists stepping on layers and layers of fallen and wet leaves that at the end of the tops of those trees, in which the two friends hide their money, still refusing to go to a bank. King-Lu does dream of the city, of traveling and opening a hotel in San Francisco. Cookie seems happier cooking with what nature gives her: mushrooms, blueberries... And that cow, that first cow that is royalty. “Half Aldernay de Insigny and half Froment de Leon, from the province of Brittany”. Although, in reality, her name was Evie and she was selected from a bunch of photos because She "she was the one with the biggest eyes."