First Cow, Kelly Reichardt, USA, 2019, 121'
The crow wished everything was black, the Owl, that everything was white.
Proverbs of Hell, William Blake.
Six films after the start of this retrospective dedicated to North American director Kelly Reichardt, we reach the seventh and final film: First Cow. This final cycle at Tabakalera coincides with this title’s release in commercial cinemas, meaning that this film will be most audiences’ first experience with the director, which is always something to celebrate. But still, it also seems appropriate to ask ourselves what happened over the course of this 27-year career that resulted in no one, from cinema-goers to distributors, deeming the director worthy of billboard space much earlier on. We could carve “always late” into a piece of wood before tossing it into the river.
As such, this text is a farewell. It is also a memento of her stylistic hallmarks, which we could think of as etched into our conciousness at this point.
On this occasion, everything starts with a quote from poet William Blake, which appeals to friendship as human essence: “The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship”. The friendship, the journey, the landscape; that could sum up just about everything. Also, in the idea of narration shaped like a river, flowing through time and the course of history.
First Cow brings together some of the situations and characters that we have seen in her previous films: a woman walking her dog in the woods (as in Wendy and Lucy); two friends sharing their memories and dreams on the riverbank (as in Old Joy); and the culture shock-encounter of the old west as the origin of North American storytelling (as in Meek's Cutoff).
And the sound. One of the questions that we have learned to pose through this retrospective has to do with sounds heard at the start of Kelly Reichardt’s films. And this question should now always be asked. Because those first minutes often times sum up the entire universe that is developed later in the story. We could close our eyes in the cinema and anticipate it: “Soon a train will blow its horn”. And a horn blows.
Over William Tyler's guitar, we read the opening credits and William Blake’s quote. Then we see a grand river and a boat traversing the landscape. Then a dog, a girl, the birds, a train heard in the distance. Everything is now in place, the film can begin.
First Cow revives the imagery of the pioneers, of when North American history was yet to be written. Jon Raymond is once again the author of the novel (The half-life) on which the screenplay is based, and the story, perhaps one of the most direct and simple of Reichardt's film catalogue, perhaps the one most closely based on a literary structure, is as follows: Cookie is a cook accompanying a group of fur trappers. King-Lu is a Chinese trader on the run. The two of them find each other in the mountains of Oregon. The two of them start a friendship. The two of them start a pastry-making business cooking up fritters using the milk of one of the continent’s first cows. This is their story, one that no history book ever covered.
Now, we can note some essential details in the title: on one hand, a leap in time from the present back to 1820. A young girl and her dog find some human bones near a river in 2019, and what follows is the story of this image in the form of a flashback. A thread back through time that brings to mind Roberto Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia (1954), where the discovery of two corpses among the ruins of Pompeii act as a mirror and trigger for its character’s storyline.
Two: there is a subtle sense of humour that spans the entire film, and runs through Cookie and King-Lu’s gestures, as if they were part of a silent film where slapstick’s speed makes way for a new slowness. There is something about Cookie’s childish fear when walking alone in the woods that is amusing. This is a new gesture in Reichardt’s work. It works. It serves to explore the humanism of these characters. Cookie talks to the cow while milking it, and laments over having lost his family on the journey, as if he were talking to an old acquaintance.
Before us is a story of two good people who are facing the world from a place of kindness, thanks, and innocence. We envisage the possibility of a world where goodness is possible, and the act of giving thanks is sincere. A world that perhaps existed before evil and ambition poisoned it all. As in other titles from Reichardt, the internal landscape of her characters is much more complex. Here, her approach has to do with the primordial innocence of her protagonists. This is not a psychological film, but rather a tale of gestures and actions. A story about the friendship between two characters that left the places they were born (therefore also a ‘road movie’) to try to find their place in the world.
Now we just have to wait for her new film. We shared space with Reichardt for a few months at Tabakalera’s cinema in 2021. Then the journey continued its course.
When we cross paths again, we’ll surely spot each other. Perhaps we’ll talk about what happened between films. Then we’ll say goodbye as a train is heard in the distance. And we’ll smile as we look in the rear-view mirror before continuing down the road. And we’ll be thankful.
First Cow, Kelly Reichardt, USA, 2019, 121'