Cow: The New Milk Cow Blues

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B+

Scottish director Andrea Arnold is known for Fish Tank, Red Road, Wuthering Heights, and American Honey, focusing on stories of girls and women, of passion and deprivation. Her first documentary, Cow, shot over four years on a factory farm in the south of England, has many of those same qualities even though it’s an almost wordless portrait of a black-and-white Holstein Friesan named Luma.

Of course, a film about a cow — a symbol of maternity, serenity, and fertility — is not just the story of one cow. The film is also an indictment of the factory farm system, a poetic meditation on our relationship to other species consciousness and is even a kind of crypto feminist film.

Implicit here is the anthropological argument that the patriarchy, and gender inequality, were born with the agricultural revolution when we started putting animals in pens. Dairy cows, who provide us with the comforts of milk, butter, cheese and ice-cream, are our enduring feminine servants.

Often hard to watch, this is not an animal story recommended for children. We see how Luma is confined in one of dozens of narrow pens that are placed in a circle, resembling the surveillance architecture of a prison.

Cattle bodies are tagged and injected with needles, their horns are cauterized. They are placed in contraptions to tip sideways to have their hoofs clipped. The manure that cakes their hindquarters is washed down. They are milked by a robotic machine which attaches suction hoses attached to their teats.

In an early scene, after Luma’s calf is pulled from her body, she licks it to life as the afterbirth dangles under her tail. Minutes later, the calf is taken from her and she bawls plaintively bring it back. Later, in the film, the scene happens again with another calf.

Arnold, aiming for an immersive effect, works with Polish cinematographer Magda Kowalczyk, who uses a handheld camera and shoots Luma at eye level under low-light barn conditions. Along with the clang of machinery and the mooing, there are the occasional fragments of talk from the farm workers.

There are also songs, from the likes of Billie Eilish and The Pogues, which sound as though they are ambient music playing in the barn, but they are obviously chosen to fit the specific scenes.

Of course, cows’ gazes, like spaniels, seem to be expressive in a human way. (To make “cow eyes” at someone is to look coy and docile as a come-on). Arnold has some fun with our tendency to project our feelings onto Luma.

When her milk has dried up, she is put in a corral with a bull to be impregnated. The bull rests his chin on her back, making snuffling sounds before mounting her. After the act is completed to a raunchy pop tune, Luma rests her chin on his back in return. The camera cuts to an image of fireworks at night.

Another sequence of liberation occurs about an hour into this 94 minute film, when Luma and the rest of the herd are released into a pasture, and they positively frolic with joy. We see Luma and the other cows rushing over to greet other cows across a barbed wire fence. Later, as the other cows rest around her at night, Luma apparently stares up at a passing airplane and the stars above as if to ask what all this mean could.

All of this is poetically fanciful and, as a former farm boy, I’m cautious about certain kinds of anthropomorphism. I believe that cows have distinctive personalities and recognizable emotions, including affection for their keepers. But even under the most agreeable conditions, few cattle get to live their natural life spans of 15 to 20 years.

Cow never makes any case for veganism or any other cause. Rather, the film is a product of the increasing scrutiny of our destructive hierarchical categories, including the unnecessary cruelty of factory farming, the growth in the legal studies of animal rights, and scientific interest in animal consciousness.

What we don’t know doesn’t hurt our consciences. Bull fighting, for example, is widely condemned for its display of public animal torture. But fighting bulls have five years of open pasture easy living before their final 20 minutes in the ring.

Meanwhile, the food on our table comes from beef cattle who live only about two years in factory feed lots while dairy cows like Luma are worn out, and put to death, after four or five years.

Cow. Directed by Andrea Arnold. Available in theatres and on demand on April 8.