Cow (Andrea Arnold, 2021) (Patreon)

Following her well-regarded short film Wasp (2003), British filmmaker Andrea Arnold's debut feature Red Road (2006) bypassed the entire film festival hierarchy, getting selected for Competition in Cannes. And in fact Cow, her new documentary, is her first feature not to play in Comp (although it did show up in Cannes' new Premieres section.) If Arnold made indie music -- like, say, Phoebe Bridgers or Wet Leg -- she could reasonably be called an "industry plant." What accounts for her fast-track to success?  

2016's American Honey was about as close as I've come to genuinely enjoying an Arnold film, mostly because she swapped out her typical dour atmosphere for a brasher tone, a sort of mix of Larry Clark voyeurism and Josephine Decker girl-power. Sadly, Cow finds her back in her po-faced "social problem" mode, but her turn to nonfiction seems to have placed her usual formal chops on pause. Following a cow from birth to death, Arnold's film cannot choose between a tactile, Sensory Ethnography approach (up the the cow's business, often literally) and a more detached Wiseman style. Instead she splits the difference, which results in a generally sloppy, artless style that frequently looks like an iPhone on cinema-mode.

I wasn't particularly fond of Viktor Kossakovsky's Gunda, but at least its overt aestheticism suggested a point of view. Arnold seems to just hang around a British dairy farm, watching as the cows are subjected to the hated milk machine (above), silently attesting to their exploitation. We witness handlers and dairy farmers in the margins, but never get to know them or understand their role in the cows' lives. Hell, I couldn't even tell you whether or not Arnold's chosen farm is organic or not. If we are supposed to fixate on a single cow, this would suggest a kind of specificity that Cow completely lacks. Instead, the film tries to generate its limited affect by gazing into the eyes of cattle. Are those eyes soulful, or resigned, or simply vacant? It shouldn't matter. Arnold is a human being, and it is she who should be giving shape to her film, instead of milking her subjects for lowfat pathos.