First Cow

Still from ‘First Cow’ by Kelly Reichardt

Kelly Reichardt’s outstanding First Cow has much in common with her earlier films: it is as tender and unobtrusive as Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy, and like Meek’s Cutoff, also set in 19th century America, it is about living under extreme pressure, both physical and psychological. Composed of ‘glimpses of people passing through’, as Reichardt herself has said, First Cow is a slow, intense film, spacious enough to allow for subtlety and shaded difference, and yet infused with closeness and intimacy. Lived-in and evocative, simultaneously nostalgic and contemporary, First Cow is reminiscent of some of the gentler songs on The Band’s early albums, which ‘were made to bring to life the fragments of experience, legend, and artifice every American has inherited as the legacy of a mythical past’, according to Greil Marcus in Mystery Train, who also added that they ‘would probably sound as right to a gang of beaver trappers as they do to us’.

The story revolves around a pair of drifters in old-time Oregon, the mild and kindly ‘Cookie’, who has been working for beaver trappers such as those that Marcus imagined, and the sharp but sympathetic King-Lu, on the run after a murderous run-in with some Russians. They strike up an unlikely friendship and soon start a modest but successful business selling ‘oily cakes’ to the rough-and-ready residents of a small settlement called Fort Tillicum. A serious problem quickly arises, however, because the delicious ‘oily cakes’, rather like doughnuts, are made with milk that the two men have stolen from the only cow in the area, which happens to belong to the local dignitary, the Chief Factor. Predictably, trouble ensues.

Despite its apparent simplicity, ’First Cow’ can be surprisingly oblique. As well as the obvious ambiguities at the beginning and end of the film, there are moments of disconcerting silence, dream logic, conversations that are sometimes oddly archaic, and key or violent twists in the plot that occur off-screen - it is not coincidental that many of the scenes in First Cow are shot in near darkness, turning them obscure and oneiric. Nevertheless, as in Kurosawa’s wonderful Dersu Uzala, a film with which Reichardt’s resonates, it is clear that at its heart is the fellowship that develops between the two main characters. This is signalled at the outset by an introductory quotation from William Blake that is taken from Proverbs of Hell - ‘the bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship’- and throughout the film there are understated but touching moments of human kindliness as well as warmhearted natural images.

At the core of their friendship is trust, a quality that is perhaps even rarer than milk in the cutthroat society in which the protagonists are living, and from which they are desperate to escape. Like Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs.Miller and Ermanno Olmi’s beautiful The Tree of Wooden Clogs, two films that were precedents and influences, First Cow has an ideological undercurrent: all three draw attention to the ruthlessness that is often necessary to ensure prosperity and success in capitalist societies. As Zygmunt Bauman remarks in Liquid Love, one of his astute analyses of the fluid superficiality of contemporary culture, where personal relationships barely differ from business transactions the decision to care for your neighbour may require a leap of faith, but it marks the passage of the survival instinct to morality. Cookie and King-Lu’s friendship, forged in a need to remain alive and flourishing on the fruits of thievery, comes to transcend those limitations.

In their short book On Kindness, Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor propose, following the well-known Biblical injunction, that ‘to love ourselves, we must love strangers’, going on to suggest that capitalism is profoundly coercive, forcing people into situations that thwart their natural altruism. Furthermore, it is a system based on the assumption that people are fundamentally self-serving, and that caring for our fellows is either weakness, a luxury, or perhaps a more sophisticated form of selfishness. Ordinary kindness, they write, is neither a manipulative bribe nor a magical cure; it is a deliberate opening up to other people. Trust is the feeling that this vulnerability won’t be abused. Put metaphysically, openheartedness, a form of expansive empathy, recognises the oneness that underlies every aspect of life.

For further exploration:

‘First Cow’ review: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/feb/22/first-cow-review-kelly-reichardt-superbly-chewy-tale-of-milk-cakes-in-the-old-west

‘Oily Cakes’ recipe: https://www.vulture.com/2020/07/first-cow-oily-cakes-recipe.html

The Band’s classic ‘The Weight’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWu-f7HFFJE

‘Dersu Uzala’: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x81xnt4

Still from ‘First Cow’ by Kelly Reichardt