No suspense or cause for concern
"First Cow" .. The simplicity of the story does not keep pace with the size of the technicians
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First Cow, "First Cow" is one of those films that has a better basic story than film as an integrated action. This is a film bearing the imprint of director Kelly Ricart. If the viewer is an expert in her films, this film will be distinguished from the first 10 minutes even without the need to read the name of the director.
This is an artistic film in the first place and not historical, as its label says, it is a historical drama as a classification, but the director's techniques overwhelm everything in it, to the point of stripping the film of any exciting elements in the story in favor of art.
The result is that many viewers will not be able to keep their eyes open for two hours, closer to two years of its duration. Yes, the viewer may sleep from extreme calm and extreme slow pace of events and may make a phone call or respond to a WhatsApp message without anything important happening. In other words, this film does not require full attention except from the contemplative viewer and not the traditional film looking for consumption.
This is a problem for Riccart and a talent at the same time, it is a talent because we are in an era full of refined consuming ideas and we are looking for an original idea, and it is a problem because despite the authenticity of the film, there is almost no story in it, and if any, there is no suspense or reason to be interested in anything. Instead of two hours without conversations or anything important, it was better to cut 40 minutes of it and leave enough 80 minutes to tell this kind of story.
Riccart wrote the script with Jonathan Raymond who is the author of the novel from which the movie is adapted, The Half Life. The film begins with a very long, wide shot of a cargo ship as seen from the shore. Time is the current time, and the clip tells us that the movie will be slow as the speed of a ship at sea.
Then we see a dog digging something, the owner of the dog enters the shot and something attracts her attention that we do not see, so she decides to dig herself with the dog. The girl continues digging, and we do not know what will appear, but in the foreground of the shot we see a shape that resembles a white rock, which later turns out to be a skull.
Riccarte doesn't do anything pretentious to get our attention, but our eyes are pointed straight at the skull! Rather, two, with two complete skeletons lying down side by side. How did the two structures get here? To whom do they return? A good introduction, but the answer is paying the price of sitting in front of the screen for two full hours in retrospective scenes that make up 95% of the film.
And when we know who the two are, we definitely know where the movie is headed. With the exception of the introduction scene in the current time, the rest of the film is located in the state of Oregon in the northwest of the United States in the nineteenth century, specifically in the twenties of that century.
Once we get to know the characters and start talking about their future plans, then we don't care about dialogue because we know that nothing of this will happen, what will happen is the discovery of a shallow tomb by a girl and a dog after 200 years in the future!
This is unfortunate because the beginning is interesting, as is the way Riccart presented it, and the stories that occurred at that time in this part of American lands were epic and varied in the diversity of the people there.
We see Kouki (John Magaro) a polite and talented cook, and King Luo (Orion Lee) is a Chinese immigrant searching for his fortune. Each of them has characteristics that are not found in the other, and friendship is formed between them.
One day, Cookie notices that a rich neighbor (Toby Jones) owns a cow, which is the first in the area. And he began to think about what nice things he might get from that cow, so he would be able to bake using milk. King suggests that they sneak together into the rich neighbor's yard in the middle of the night and milk the cow.
In this way, Cookie and King turn into "Julie Russo and Sheila Lockins" of Oregon, the latter two famous cooks in New York in the 1970s and 1980s.
The friendship of the two men is one of the best elements of the film and is very convincing from Riccart's perspective, but it is not necessarily realistic, and of course completely opposite to the late traditional vision of John Ford, for example, we talk about the friendship of a white man with an Asian man in the American West, and when we say Riccart’s perspective, we mean that it looks at them in a contemporary, progressive, not traditional, view. .
In the story, Cookie works as a cook for a fur hunter, and when he goes to the woods to search for mushrooms, he finds King shivering in hiding, running away from Russians who want revenge on him for killing a man who killed his friend. In most films set in that part of America or at that time, the main story will be about this part entirely.
But Riccarte has another opinion and vision and is not interested in this very traditional aspect from a progressive point of view. Rather, she sees the issue in terms of friendship that turns into a business relationship. King manages the operation and Cookie makes food wonders whenever the ingredients are available, and thanks to the stolen cow's milk they make the most delicious biscuits and honey cakes, which travelers flock to through those lands to the point of crowding and out of quantities.
We wonder: Who is telling this story? Is it its author, or is it in the imagination of the girl who found the two structures? According to the writer, the novel gives equal space for the two times, but the film does not give the current time but the starting scene.
We do not need to mention the end, and if we do, we will not spoil anything because the girl stumbled upon two skeletons at the beginning and the last scene. We see Cookie and King lying next to each other in the position of the two.
This story contains many symbols that may have several interpretations, and it is very simple and abstract for a two-hour movie rich in art, and at the same time it can be narrated without the introduction scene, which loses its value once the two characters are identified. If Riccart had taken the introduction to the end of the film and wrote: "After 200 years," the story might have had a greater impact on us.
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This film requires only the full attention of the contemplative viewer and not the traditional film looking for consumption.
Instead of two hours with nothing important, it would have been better to cut 40 minutes and leave enough 80 to tell this kind of story.