Wild Thing

It might seem unusual, but the journey of one of Britain’s finest social realist auteurs, Andrea Arnold, was always going to end up with a doc on a dairy farm. The filmmaker has always chronicled life on the fringes, moving away from urban centres into nature. Brogan Morris traces her path from Milk to Cow.

With Cow, Andrea Arnold has presented us with another slice of life. It concerns a broken family: a weary mother and her wayward children navigating a harsh modern world with what little maneuverability they have. Home is indifferent to their suffering, crowded yet lonely, where real connection is a rare thing amidst the noise. There are fleeting moments of freedom and joy, found in large part beyond tiny concrete living spaces and out in the great wide open of nature. And the soundtrack: wall to wall pop and hip-hop, always playing, echoing through the film and the subjects’ lives come what may. It’s an Andrea Arnold picture, alright; only, this time, the humans have been replaced by livestock.

That Andrea Arnold made a documentary about cows might not seem as strange as, say, Andrea Arnold making a Marvel movie or Andrea Arnold being hired to adapt Dune, but it’s surprising enough given how Arnold made her name as a director. Before Cow – which follows a dairy cow named Luma and her calves over a period of four years on an English farm – Arnold had built a well-earned reputation as one of Britain’s finest social realist filmmakers, in the vein of Ken Loach and Alan Clarke.

From her early shorts through to four fiction features, Arnold has been an up-close chronicler of (human) life on the fringes of society, with the urban centre and concrete suburbia the primary locations for her excavational human dramas. She started in Glasgow, with her 2006 feature debut Red Road, an overcast kitchen sink thriller in which a surveillance system operator spends her days studying people. Now, with Cow, Arnold’s first piece of nonfiction, we find ourselves in the English countryside, while people – in this case, farmworkers – are relegated to the sidelines, their behaviour made to seem as alien to us as it must to the animals from whose perspective the film is taken.

It comes as little surprise that Arnold’s characteristically immediate shooting style translates easily to nonfiction filmmaking, her films having always had the handheld, naturally unfolding flavour of documentary anyway. But Cow is small, and Arnold’s projects until now had only been growing larger. 2003’s Wasp, the film that skyrocketed Arnold (and won her an Oscar in 2005), was a low-budget, 26-minute short shot in her native Dartford starring Danny Dyer; her last gig had her directing the entire second season of HBO’s blockbuster drama Big Little Lies with Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon and Meryl Streep.

Big Little Lies’ Monterey seems, not unlike Cow’s Park Farm, very far from Glasgow or Dartford. Since her debut, Arnold has been inching away from the city – perhaps, like many of her characters, seeking escape in nature. Red Road was brutally urban, all high-rises and depressed, graffitied streets; 2009’s Fish Tank found a little more green among the grey, with trips to a rural pub and an off-motorway lake representing virtually paradisal escapes from the film’s primary East London council estate setting; by her road movie American Honey, Arnold was cruising the American Midwest, passing oil fields and forever prairies. With Big Little Lies, the director had reached coastal California, an area of seemingly abundant sunshine and affluence, but where – as the show’s story goes – trouble lurks beneath the surface.

Not just a homecoming, Cow is also something of a palate cleanser for its director following Big Little Lies. That was indie darling Arnold dipping her toes in Hollywood waters for the first real time, and it notoriously ended in series showrunner David E Kelley and late season one director Jean-Marc Vallée reshaping Arnold’s footage in post-production, an ordeal that reportedly left her “heartbroken”. ( For the record, the season of the show that ultimately aired was muddled and hardly characteristic of Arnold.)

Arnold was editing Cow alongside Big Little Lies, as her influence on the show was reportedly slipping away – and it’s easy to read the documentary as shaped by the experience. In contrast to Big Little Lies 2’s soapy, multi-stranded storytelling, Cow is authentic, intimate and cinematic – a film that, devoid of speech and told through expression, is a universal tale. Arnold’s first post-Big Little Lies project also, perhaps tellingly, sees a return for the director to one of her common themes: the impotence of a less-privileged individual, almost always female, in a callous, uncaring system.

Luma is powerless as her children are separated from her upon birth, never to be seen again. She can do nothing but comply as she’s corralled from cow shed to field and back again; her time to feed, produce and mate all decided by the farm’s schedule. A subject of Arnold’s has never felt quite so helpless – though even in her fiction, there has always been a sense that the director’s characters are terminally trapped by circumstances beyond their control.

In Red Road, Fish Tank and American Honey, Arnold gives a fatalistic impression of life for the downtrodden: as much as her characters kick and scream against their lot, hope of escaping the poverty they were born into seems slim. In her 2011 elemental adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff manages to climb up a social class, but he must turn cold and ruthless to do it. The fact of his evidently non-white heritage, meanwhile, is forever set to determine how society treats him, rich or not.

Of all Arnold’s films, Cow has the most in common stylistically with Wuthering Heights, also set on a farm in rural England (here, it’s the Yorkshire Moors in the late 18th century). Dialogue is stripped to the bone, tactile cinematography and howling sound design forever underlining the sheer presence of nature – the film is all raw feeling. It is, like Cow, about longing – not between a mother and her separated children, but two would-be lovers parted by societal pressures instead.

Before Cow, animals had already always played a small if significant part in Arnold’s films (titles have included Dog, Wasp and Fish Tank; in the latter, a Travellers’ horse chained up in a scrapyard provides emotional catharsis for the wild teenager at the story’s heart). In Wuthering Heights, however, human behaviour itself is bestial. Characters speak little; more often, they fight and frolic. In one scene, Cathy licks a beaten Heathcliff’s wounds clean.

Revisiting scenes from Arnold’s filmography where human characters display their baser instincts, Cow doesn’t seem like so much of a departure. 1998’s Milk, Arnold’s first short film, ends with a young man suckling from a woman whose breasts have swelled with milk meant for her stillborn child. In Fish Tank, Mia urinates on the living room floor of her (and her mother’s) secretly married lover, as if marking her territory. American Honey, meanwhile, culminates with a pack of young magazine sellers howling around a campfire into the night. Even in her films about people, Arnold emphasised that she was always telling stories about animals.

Cow is in UK cinemas from January 14.

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