‘COW’ needs no words to convey one animal’s life
In “COW,” a deeply moving documentary about the life cycle of one dairy cow, there is virtually no human dialogue. The only character that counts is Luma, the cow. Thanks to her expressive sounds and soulful eyes, we sense what it must feel like to be a creature whose only purpose is to provide milk and procreate (which she must do to keep making milk). AP National Writer Jocelyn Noveck writes that in director Andrea Arnold’s careful, unhurried hands, “COW” teaches a sobering and poignant lesson, no matter how one feels about that cow’s milk in their coffee. Opens in select theaters and on digital platforms Friday.
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.
“This film is an endeavor to consider cows,” Arnold says in a statement accompanying her film. “To move us closer to them ... not in a romantic way but in a real way. It’s a film about one dairy cow’s reality and acknowledging her great service to us.”
“COW,” an IFC Films release, is unrated by the Motion Picture Association of America. Running time: 94 minutes.