Woman with a dog
who finds a skeleton out in the woods: it is a cliché that usually kicks off a murder plot, but here we are instead transported a hundred years back in time and see, so to speak, the corpse alive and moving.
Already here we know how it will go for the film's main characters.
But we are all going to die, unfortunately.
It is a congenial appropriation based on the realization of the fragility of life but also of its inexorable course.
The circle of life, as Mufasa would have said.
American indie icon Kelly Reichardt works with mood and atmosphere rather than complex intrigue, with a focus on people on the margins.
Not unlike Chloé Zhao and her Nomadland, but still less dreamy, more unbrushed.
And preferably with images in the old image format 4: 3.
Reichardt explores the
same chips as others but finds, and focuses on, small things that colleagues miss or opt out of.
Everyday details that create new worlds in already known ones.
Like here in First cow - a western about pastries.
The playing field is a small muddy fur hunting station in Oregon, populated by ugly, dirty and nasty types with dollar signs in their eyes and almost animalistic grunting sounds.
And in the midst of this brutal gag, the more mentally fine chef Cookie and his new Chinese friend King-Lu are fighting for their survival.
They get the clever idea to milk the area's first cow, imported by the rich steward (because he wants milk in the tea) and then bake donut-like cakes ("oily cakes") that make the grumpy fur hunters babble as children.
The steward is the area's
British boss, a man with homesickness who gets hot in the soul when he eats the cakes, which reminds him of London. He orders a French fruit pie to impress a distinguished guest - which leads to a wonderful sequence, in the Manager's salon, which in a laconic way drives with man's vanity and need for assertion. It is a conversation that moves from the question of how many lashes one should give a mutineer to the prevailing hat fashion in Paris.
Perhaps Reichardt's (and the permanent screenwriter Jonathan Raymond) perhaps best film, the settler drama Meek's cutoff (2010), gave, just like First Cow, an alternative story about how the Wild West was conquered.
It did not happen with a pistol and a white hat, but with a rusty shovel and muddy suffering.
And everyone can join.
The formation of the young United States appears here as an ethnic melting pot, not the strictly white adventure that we are otherwise usually served.
That said, details.
First cow abounds in them, large and small, and together they give a vivid and almost social anthropological picture of the 19th century American backyard.
Which may sound sad.
It's not - basically a nice story about friendship between two tender skinned people in a world of rawhide.