Review: 'COW' needs no words to convey one animal's life
07.04.2022 - 00:43
/ abcnews.go.com
The human voice, a necessity in virtually any film, is barely existent and wholly secondary in “COW.” We hear only random bits of conversation, muffled and unimportant, from people we don’t know and don’t need to.The only character that counts in Andrea Arnold’s deeply moving documentary about the life cycle of one dairy cow is Luma, the cow. Thanks to her expressive sounds and soulful eyes — which we both see, and see through — we sense what it must feel like to be her, a creature whose only purpose is to provide milk, mate and procreate. In Arnold’s careful, unhurried hands, it is a sobering lesson, though one without a clear agenda.
Arnold simply seems interested in telling us Luma’s story. And that is enough.It should be noted that the humans in “COW,” workers on a British dairy farm, hardly seem evil. They are, in fact, amiable and fairly humane as they spend their days milking the cows with mechanized nozzles, guiding them into and out of endless metal cages and contraptions, stapling tags on their ears, making sure they mate, supervising their births.
It is the entire enterprise that's examined here. We all knew it existed. Most of us just hadn’t sat down and watched it play out for 94 minutes.We begin with what would seem, initially, a heartwarming scene: the birth of a calf.
The newborn is pulled from Luma in extreme closeup (and total silence), glistening in afterbirth. Gently, Luma licks her baby clean.It's a thrilling sight — and a deceptive one. The two are almost immediately separated, the calf taken to a different part of the farm.
Luma seems later to be looking for her. The baby is fed through a plastic contraption. Mother’s milk? That’s for our coffee.Arnold goes on to depict a life of endless mud and
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