Cannes 2021: Cow
festival de cannes 2021Switching her focus from fiction to documentary, Andrea Arnold's Cow which is screening as part of the 2021 Cannes Film Festival focuses on the lives of two dairy cows as they go about their lives. Feeling somewhat similar to recent works such as Gunda, Cow allows the audience to live and breathe alongside these animals and naturally see both the positives and negatives they experience. This is in the hope that the audience can naturally find some deeper thesis or understanding surrounding these creatures which are ultimately exploited every day for the benefit of humans.
Even though on paper it seems clear that Cow would simply become another pro veganism film like the now infamous 2018 feature Dominion, the messaging of Cow is much lighter and more objective. It truly doesn't feel as if Cow is specifically trying to find any certain perspective or purpose but instead is allowing the audience an unfiltered look at the lives of these animals. While some of the events they face are quite traumatic such as the burning of their horns, others are nicer such as the cows swaying to the songs of Billie Eilish or hanging out with their children. Any conclusion the audience will reach about the more gruesome and off-putting nature of their treatment will be reached naturally and honestly.
The thing that helps make Cow stand out against the overall disappointing Gunda is the direction given to it by Andrea Arnold. While it is clear is that Cow overall is hoping to present an unfiltered and unaltered look at the events it is capturing, it is equally obvious that Arnold understands human emotion and can sneak in small editing and filmmaking tools to help push the emotional experience of a scene without taking away its authenticity. While the film is still quite slow to a point that will alienate some audiences and the film feels rather long for only being 93-minutes, this does help alleviate a lot of the pacing issues that plagued Gunda and other entries to the genre.
While it is undeniably hard if not impossible to imagine that the general audience will find much praise or love for Cow, for fans of slower documentaries the film is undeniably one of the better editions as of late. With smart direction propelling the film forward, it is hard not to feel some emotion get evoked by the film which ultimately is a sign of the film achieving its purpose. Sure, it isn't a masterpiece or life-changing experience, but compared to other similar films it feels like a breath of fresh air in the genre.
