Jason Adams reporting from the NYFF which opens tomorrow
First Cow is the sort of blunt title that you immediately have a bit of a chuckle with when you picture somebody speaking it at the theater's box office -- "Two tickets for First Cow, please!" (I'd love for somebody to program a double feature with Her Smell just for such whimsy. "I came for First Cow but I stayed for Her Smell.") It's just this sort of bluntness that sticks and that director Kelly Reichardt (Wendy & Lucy, Certain Women) lovingly specializes in. A first cow is what we are promised and a first cow is what we get, dagnabit.
Reichardt is nothing if not a documentarian of practicality and face value -- as in both that she sees the value in staring at faces, and in that things being what they seem to be is never boring to her. Her camera is always fascinated by ordinary people doing ordinary things, and under her eye the ordinary magnifies, finding itself extraordinary...
Kelly ReichardtFirst Cow tells us the tale of how two low folk, a cook named Cookie that nobody wants (John Magaro) and a naked murderer from China named King Lu (Orion Lee), find each other. And it's a tale that tells how they then find that cow, that first one, and how they then together bake up a small scheme that nevertheless lasts far beyond their meager reach, stretching centuries, touching the future. It's a tale of true friendship, whittled out in time spent together doing separate tasks while not speaking -- a swept dirt floor and a bundle of patchy flowers sealing the deal. It drips with honey, sweet and real.
Reichardt starts the film with the duo's destination and then circles back, showing us the roads they took to find their fate -- every step small and imperfectly placed, meandering and human, but part of that necessary leap towards making of them, and with them each of us, Mankind. She situates their smallness into myth and she shows us how we are all, every one of us, making decisions moment to moment that matter. That last. That just holding your friend close can be a choice as monumental as the pyramids, in the right hands.
First Cow plays on September 28th (followed by a Q&A with Kelly Reichardt) and on October 3rd