Returning to the 19th century and the Oregon territory of MEEK's CUTOFF (2010), its 4:3 aspect spatio to boot, Kelly Reichardt's eight feature FIRST COW is an extremely humane buddy movie (reminiscent of her third feature OLD JOY, 2006). Chef Otis “Cookie” Figowitz (Magaro) finds unexpected camaraderie with a Chinese immigrant King-lu (Lee) amid the frontier settlement where their fate is strangely and poignantly linked with the only cow on that primitive land.
An opening gambit is set in the present day, after conditioning its audience to the slowly enfolding pace by watching a vessel calmly coursing through the screen from stem to stern, the film firmly nails the denouement at the commencement, two skeletons are chancily discovered lying side by side, which we would soon twig that they are our two protagonists, the question about how they end up like that becomes the chief fillip to keep us hooked in Reichardt's unusually elliptical, anti-sensational approach.
The usual undersides of the frontier life, incivility, fisticuffs, treachery, barbarity, malevolence, etc., all transpire in the story, but either on the sidelines (a disgruntled old man with a raven on his shoulder, played by the recently departed Auberjonois , for instance, whose wanton menace never comes to fruition) or in the murkiness (the uncouth trappers' bellyaching), or completely off-screen, like its sublime ending, where Reichardt tentatively intimates us the one who would end both Cookie and King- lu's lives, but she tactfully saves us from witness the gory and cruelty by simply leaving it in omission, instead, focusing on the tender, amicable, wordless moments precede that, especially when King-lu fleetingly contemplates whether to leave a wounded Cookie alone in the woods, before thinks better of it and decides to stay with his pal,come hell or high water.
That ultimate celebration of two men's primal friendship is the bonanza here (prefigured by the opening caption of William Blake's poem), without any connotation of romantic tingling, Reichardt puts two human souls together, friendship is the most natural outgrowth, both Magaro and Lee underlines humility and understanding adroitly, tinted by their respective shyness or canniness, their temperaments are poles apart, but what makes them human bring them together in a shanty, and centuries later, two skeletons in eternity.
In the same wavelength, Reichardt boils down the bane of their snuffed fate to the capitalism's possessiveness, through the British colonist Chief Factor (Jones), the proprietor of the cow, and his vile attitude towards the proletariats, as inane as he is, it would've be a win-win situation had he been truly endowed with some good sense (a lucrative cookie business might be in the offing); as for the pair of have-nots, it is a different object lesson, sometimes against one's best judgement, enough is as good as a feast.
However, the most exhilarating fact derived from the film is that Reichardt has gradually acquired estimable proficiency and virtuosity to concretize her aesthetics and conceits, FIRST COW is wholesomely immersed in a period landscape and mentality that coheres so organically that why Reichardt hasn't been a household name in our universe has more and more inched toward an exasperating disgrace.
referential entries: Reichardt's MEEK'S CUTOFF (2010, 6.6/10); CERTAIN WOMEN (2016, 8.0/10).
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