First Cow
Directed by Kelly Reichardt
Running time: 2hr02 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
John Magaro in First Cow
First Cow begins with Alia Shawkat, which is never a bad way to start anything. In the present day, an unnamed woman rambles with her dog along the banks of the Columbia River in Oregon, when the mutt seizes upon something curious in the grass. The woman is played by Shawkat; the untoward discovery is a pair of human skeletons, side by side in a shallow grave.
Many a generic mystery has started a similar way, but director Kelly Reichardt has many a quiet surprise in store for us. This is the last we see of Shawkat, and the present day too. We jump briskly back in time to 1820, where the Oregon Trail is still being blazed: this turns out to be the story of Cookie Figowitz (the wonderful, careworn John Magaro), a reluctant chef to a boorish band of fur trappers, who dreams of someday opening a San Francisco bakery for a more appreciative clientele.
It's a notably humble, wholesome goal for this historical era of frontier pioneering and fortune-seeking, but then First Cow is a film about modest ambitions, and the braided ways in which society, capitalism and simple sod's law conspire to thwart them. Cookie finds a lone ally in King-Lu (Orion Lee), a Chinese immigrant and outlaw with his own dreams of land-owning. Together, they hatch a business plan that connects the austere lifestyles of fellow settlers, Cookie's knack for sweet baked goods, and the first cow the region has ever seen — the property of a wealthy English trader, drolly played by Toby Jones.
Working from a novel by her regular collaborator Jonathan Raymond, Reichardt has the components here of a cast-in-stone folk fable, but reassembles them to bracingly modern, funny, teasing effect. It's of a piece with her other films about economic marginalisation and stray social kindness in the isolated Pacific Northwest, but with its own buttery warmth: the queer undertones of Cookie and King-Lu's relationship, neither coyly concealed nor tidily named, lend complex human dimensions to tacit political commentary. All that, and it features the dreamiest blueberry clafoutis ever seen on film: Reichardt, long one of America's most essential and elemental filmmakers, is on uncommonly generous form here.
And yet First Cow, for all its rich, fragrant, period-evoking delights, is never preserved in honeyed amber — notwithstanding cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt’s exquisitely burnished lighting of every frame. That disconnected contemporary prologue never leaves our minds, keeping us off balance us as we wonder how we got from there to here, in several senses. Is this a hard-luck story that would play out much differently today? Are America and its latter-day cow-keepers now more sympathetic to the country's Cookies and King-Lus? We leave Reichardt's film enlightened but restlessly questioning, sated but hungry — for answers, yes, but also a good doughnut. You can't ask much more of a film than that.
FIRST COW (2020) Written by Kelly Reichardt and Jonathan Raymond | Based on Raymond’s novel The Half-Life | Shot by Christopher Blauvelt | Edited by Kelly Reichardt
Available to watch in cinemas, and on Mubi from 9 July