This article was first published on WeChat public account: Gyro Movie (WeChat ID: toroscope)
Author: Few Scrappers
A white cook and a Chinese businessman met in a small American town in the 1820s. Because of a cow, the two started their own businesses and set up a street stall to sell cakes; but because of the risky business opportunity, they went nowhere.
The film "The First Cow" uses a rare western story to let us see the other side of the Chinese in American movies——
It is neither the enchanting mandarin of the Manchus nor the melancholy and silent of the Chinese laborers, but the shrewd and reckless image we are most familiar with .
"The First Cow" is not only the long-awaited movie by all fans this year, it also has great hopes of competing for next year's Oscars.
We can see that the freshness of rotten tomatoes is 96% , and the well-known American scoring website metacritic has a score of 89. It can be said that it is a foolproof "must-see movie of the year".
At the Berlin Film Festival at the beginning of the year, Gyro also scored a super high score of four and a half stars when he watched "The First Cow" on the spot.
However, this film, which appeared at this year's Berlin Film Festival and was shortlisted in the main competition for the Golden Bear Award, is not the most eye-catching feature of its Chinese subject matter, but that it is a new film directed by Kelly Reichard .
One, new neo-realism? Female director?
For mainland movie audiences, Kelly Reichard is not a familiar name.
She is not like Patty Jenkins, who is known for the high box office and influence of "Wonder Woman", nor is she ranked as the best Oscar with "The Hurt Locker" like Catherine Bigelow. Among the directors.
However, from the perspective of the authorship of American art films and female directors, Kelly Rechard absolutely cannot be ignored, and some fans even named him the contemporary " Shantell Ackerman ".
Kelly Rechard was born in 1964. She became interested in photography since she was a child. After obtaining a master's degree from the School of the Boston Museum of Art, she began to participate in independent filmmaking.
In 1994, "Weeds Overgrown" was Richard's feature film debut. With this film, she immediately became a rising star in the film industry and was shortlisted for three independent spirit awards and jury awards at the Sundance Film Festival.
From the perspective of genre and subject matter alone, "Weeds Overgrown" is not new.
It brought the "Male and Female Thief" back to the screen during the new Hollywood movie period , allowing an idle street gangster to form a desperate mandarin duck with a housewife with a clear and boring life.
But the more the film develops to the back, the more it presents a sense of absurdity and deconstruction.
The protagonist thought that he had shot and killed a black man and drove to escape. In fact, the black man was unscathed. When the escape loses its meaning, the delightful romance that accompanies the escape journey naturally reveals nothingness.
Using the mediocre and boring American low-level family , put on the road genre film, plus a lot of rock music, jazz, and flashbacks, serialized chapter pictures-Reichard has covered this trouble-free escape journey with a heavy burden Black postmark, sent to countless middle-aged people with hollow hearts .
After the film’s artistic success, Rechard originally planned to continue filming, but due to the restriction of female status , she often fell into despair in the process of raising funds for filming. In the end, only short feature films and documentaries could be shot with an ultra-eight millimeter camera.
This is true of "Ode" born in 1999 and "Year" in 2001 .
Therefore, before filming "Yesterday's Joy" in 2006, Reichard had been in a rift between ideals and reality- there was no way to stitch between the subject matter he wanted to shoot and the funds raised. During this period, she devoted herself to teaching and became a resident artist in film and electronic art at Bard College. Fortunately, she and Todd Hines (director of "Velvet Gold Mine" and "Carroll") have been old friends for many years, which made her directorial career take a turn for the better.
However, this turning point was not mainly due to Hines's financial avenues, but a friend of his literary circle, Jonathan Raymond, who became the inspiration for Kelly Reichard to this day.
At that time, Rechard was struggling to find a suitable story to make a movie, and Raymond happened to have a novel with a simple plot. Under the matchmaking bridge of Hines, the two began a long-term cooperation regardless of each other. And this novel is "Yesterday Joy" .
If "Weeds Overgrown" allowed Rechard's film talents to be seen in the film industry, then "Yesterday Joy" created Rechard 's simple and realistic style with long shots and few dialogues .
The story of this movie is very simple. A wife is pregnant with a pregnant career man, Mark, and another sloppy man, Kurt, who lives a hippie life. The two meet in a hot spring on the mountain to reminisce about the past.
The film flows slowly in the two people driving silently and enjoying the scenery, as well as a conversation full of anxiety and nostalgia. Richard's questioning of the Bush administration and the analysis of middle-aged American men at the bottom have formed a spiral of mutual influence here.
Two years later, Reichard adapted Raymond's short story "The Train Choir" into the movie "Wendy and Lucy" , which won unanimous praise from the critics, and thus set off a new reality about the United States . "Ism" genre discussion.
The chief film critic of The New York Times, A.O.Scott, wrote an article in March 2009 and proposed the genre of "new neorealism" , and used Reichard's "Wendy and Lucy" as The representative proposed.
When watching this movie, the first similar movie that people think of, except for the Italian neo-realism genre, is the "Rosetta" by the Darnet brothers .
They are all young and frizzy little girls, and they are also the bottom of society who are in urgent need of work. The difference is-"Rosetta" is about the decline and struggle of characters in class dilemmas, while "Wendy and Lucy" shows It is the sense of deprivation and powerlessness of the lower class due to poverty .
In 2010's "Mick's Shortcut" , Reichard used a special female perspective to completely subvert the western movie myth that has always made the United States proud.
Let a group of gold prospectors follow the command of an Indian to find a source of livelihood. The great spirit of pioneering the west has become a paradoxical political fable here.
Many people interpreted this story as the Iraq War during the Bush administration.
American nationals are the group of gold diggers, and Mick, the racially biased guide, is a metaphor for President Bush.
In 2013, "Operation Night" , which tells the story of three environmentalists who blow up the dam in order to attract people's attention, became the worst word-of-mouth film in the Reichard film sequence. Despite the blessings of Jesse Eisenberg, the bland plot and the lack of convincing logic of character behavior make the whole movie vulgar and uninteresting.
Fortunately, in 2016, "A Certain Woman" returned to the familiar "Kelly Reichard" style.
Although it is a three-stage female sketch , each story is looking for the toughness and personality of women in their daily lives. Not long after the film was released, it was collected and released by the well-known Blu-ray disc manufacturer CC.
Over the years, only these six feature films have allowed critics who are concerned about the latest trends in film art to discuss for Kelly Rechard. Is she a pioneer of new new realism? Or a hard-line female director and writer?
Perhaps the answer to the question is not black and white. Rechard's charm is more of a leftist standpoint, re-examining the abundance and stagnation of reality and history with a female perspective .
Second, the straightforward "First Cow"
After understanding the journey of this female director, Rechard, and then admiring this "First Cow" , we will not only focus on the Chinese who has traveled across the oceans.
This film is also adapted from the novel of Richard’s old friend Jonathan Raymond, and it is his first novel "Half-Life" published in 2004. The reason why Richard did not shoot at the time is because of this. The story of the novel was too complicated, which was naturally difficult for her, who was still short of funds at the time.
Even the "First Cow" this time is just a clue from the original novel. In the United States in 1820, some small towns in Oregon were still in the early stages of development. Indians, British and gold prospectors from various countries gathered here , all risking their early wealth accumulation.
By chance, Chinese businessman Jin Lu was saved by Otis, a cook from Maryland.
In order to repay his favor, Jinlu invited Otis to live with him and look for opportunities to make a fortune together.
It didn't take long for the opportunity to come. The British general in the small town, Fiktor, spent a lot of money to buy a high-quality dairy cow from Europe, just to drink pure milk tea. And this cow has become the first cow so far on this land .
It just so happened that Otis lamented the bread he made. If milk can be added, it will be delicious.
In order to satisfy his friend's wishes, Jin Lu boldly proposed that the two secretly milked the milk at night together .
After tasting the extraordinary taste of the milk cake made by Otis, a business opportunity emerged in Jinlu's heart: selling cakes at the market. Sure enough, the cake not only sold out instantly, but some people were willing to raise the price to buy it. This makes Jinlu, who has been eager to make a fortune, taste the sweetness.
In this way, Jinlu stood guard on the tree, Otis was milking the milk below, the two cooperated, and the wealth increased day by day.
The crisis began when General Fektor did not hesitate to bow and came to Otis's stall to taste . Although Féktor did not taste the milk added to the cake, he valued Otis' cooking skills. Under the praise, he wanted to invite him to make more advanced French pastries and to add to his presence in his mansion.
As a low-level citizen, Otis certainly did not dare to resist orders. But Jinlu has a city in the heart, knowing that the milk stealing will soon be exposed.
After the two went to the chief to offer French pastries, the chief invited them to watch the first cow together. And this milk is like a pet. It is indifferent and alienated to the serious owner of the commander , but on the contrary , he is more intimate with Otis who gives him a "chest massage" every day and night. This makes the sergeant next to the commander deeply suspicious.
That night, when the two stole milk again, an accident happened.
When Jinlu was on guard, he stepped on the broken branches and alarmed the attendants of the chief. Otis took Jinlu all the way to escape, ignoring the overturned milk can. When the commander saw someone stealing milk, he was instantly angry. He knew that there were only two people in the entire town who could steal milk, and that was Jinlu and Otis.
At the beginning of the movie, a modern man dug a bridge with two bones on the river bank. Therefore, seeing Jinlu and Otis being pursued by the chief, we naturally think that the movie will eventually show the plot of the two being killed.
But like other films before Rechard, the film ends with the wounded Otis and the exhausted Jinlu lying on the ground to rest. We don't know whether they were killed or not.
A lot of people will be the film, seen as the US capital this early doctrine of wealth accumulated historical film, but the director Reichardt apparently neither a history buff, nor sat political critics.
Indeed, whether it is the British chief who has spent a huge amount of money to introduce cows, or the status quo of ordinary civilians in ragged clothes and lack of food, this film has a strong critical stance. But the British general's "Zhu Men Liquor Shou" appeared more in comical ugliness rather than cruel morbidity.
The light and shadow charm of "The First Cow" lies in its delay in real life gaps, its obsession with naive characters, the smearing of the texture of oil paintings, and its sigh for the lack of wealth.
After Jinlu and Otis met again in the small town, Jinlu warmly invited the savior to his home. Along the way, Jinlu and Otis chatted freely, and when they got home, they were toasting and greeting each other like an old friend who hadn't seen them for a long time. When the two talked about the resting place, there was no trace of embarrassment. Instead, there were reveries of the lower-level people after chattering, or the sluggishness of the place where they sighed.
Obviously, this is a real life gap that continues from "Yesterday's Joy".
Rechard looked at the dialogue between two men from another angle . She used women's sensitive feelings to figure out the inevitable frustration in the dialogue between men. This frustration includes sincerity, because sincerity is destined not to belong to talk, but to the temporary delay of emotional extraction. Following the delay in this scene, we can feel the naive attitude of too many characters in the film.
The most obvious is the cook Otis, he is a simple man who bought new shoes and would tear off his trousers to hide his high boots after he was noticed .
When I was milking the cow, I was so grateful for it;
In this life, I just want to open a bakery and be a cook;
When someone went out to fight and asked him to help look after the children, he also calmly agreed.
But silly people tend to be sincere. Otis would be moved because of the loss of his "husband" and "children" because of milk, and because he saw the poor Chinese who had never met, he would take care of him and save him.
So much so, the old man in Quaotis boots.
Obese father taking the child to the bar.
They are all naive, full of bottom-level flavor.
The hippie Kurt in "Yesterday's Joy" or the horse-horse girl in "A Woman" all have this silly gene.
This can't help but think of Van Gogh's early sketches. When he sketched the farmers and peasant women who were digging potatoes and doing farm work in the Netherlands, the stupid stupidity of the Dutch peasants was moved by Van Gogh's stupid brushstrokes.
Not the foolish move of the stupid , but in the charmingly true.
In my opinion, even though Reichard was arrogant in his debut work "Weeds Overgrown" , he knew where to add flashbacks and where to insert rock music. His vigor and agility is no less than that of Danny Boyle in "Guess". The genius handling of sound and picture in "The Train".
Therefore, it is entirely possible to classify Reichard as a clever and dexterous director. However, she likes to portray stupid characters in movies, and she also likes to work stupidly. This kind of "stupid" can also be found in Van Gogh's landscape oil paintings. In other words, this is a heavy and sticky touch.
In "Wendy and Lucy" , let Wendy call the old guard's cell phone again and again, or travel through the streets where people go.
In "A Certain Woman" , the horse-horse girl repeatedly feeds the horse fodder, or searches back and forth in the city of female lawyers.
There is no soundtrack, no drama conflict, but the accumulated anxiety and waiting emotion to appear repeatedly in the picture.
This is different from Gus Van Sant, who is also known for his realism. He is much more distant and formalized. It is also different from Ken Roach in the United Kingdom and Ashar Fahati in Iran, who have The narrative conflict is full of tension.
Rechard doesn't care about the bloatness caused by repetition , because like Van Gogh's oil paintings, the seemingly rough and careless repetitive lines form a true internal depiction of life.
The sense of stagnation in "The First Cow" is an undeveloped dense jungle, a muddy market floor, and the clothing of civilians caused by poverty.
When poverty becomes the norm, the feeling of want cannot be concealed.
This sense of lack is most evident in Reichard's last film "A Certain Woman".
The four women in the film are like Rechard's interpretation: they are all looking for something. Laura Dunn looks for love and career; Michelle Williams looks for family and affection; Lily Gusleton looks for belonging and warmth; Kristen Stewart looks for stability and identification.
But in "The First Cow", the sense of scarcity caused by wealth makes the lower life like a creeping snail, always looking for a sense of direction in the near stagnant progress, and eager to know what to do after finding the right direction. To arrive at the time.
For this cruel question, Reichard chose the same way as always: Let two people lie on the spot in the jungle. Will the gunner shoot them to death? Are the two bones that modern people have turned out? Did they realize their dreams, one opened a hotel and the other opened a bakery? Everything is put into real life that continues to be impermanent and endless.
This article was first published on WeChat public account: Gyro Movie (WeChat ID: toroscope)
Author: Few Scrappers
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