First Cow

FIRST COW   ***1/2

Kelly Reichardt

2019

IDEA:  In 1820s Oregon Territory, a fur trapper befriends a Chinese immigrant, and together start a baking business using a cow shipped to the area from France.

BLURB:  In the damp evergreens, muds, and ochres of an untamed Pacific Northwest, First Cow stages a microcosm of America in its incipient progress: toward industrialism and capitalism, and the social and material realities upon which they operate. Reichardt’s opening image of a cargo ship crawling across an Oregon river casts the historical events of the film as a direct prelude to these organizing systems of global contemporary life, effectively transforming even the most unassuming moments into harbingers of a faraway modernity. Yet Reichardt and screenwriter Jonathan Raymond are not didactic about these signals; by meticulously but only partially parceling out details of character and milieu, they create an immersive, in-the-moment portrait of the early American West that feels appropriately inchoate, filled with itinerant pursuits and narratives in media res. Supported by Christopher Blauvelt’s earthy lensing, First Cow is so impressive largely because of the authenticity this approach confers, making palpable a world not yet fully molded to the image of commerce, whose opportunities have been only provisionally tapped. It’s also impressive because Reichardt and Raymond refuse to view this fledgling American project in popular dualistic terms. If they’re somberly aware of the country’s founding and proliferating principles of exploitation and inequality, they’re also eager to celebrate the multiethnic relations that make up its cultural bedrock. First Cow is characterized by the poignant ambivalence that arises from this measured perspective: from the understanding that a cow’s milk can be both a gift of a nature and a privatized commodity.

The Cormorants

THE CORMORANTS   **1/2

Fabio Bobbio

2016

IDEA:  Two close preteen friends hang out over one long summer.

BLURB:  Fully evoking the term “lazy summer,” The Cormorants fills its runtime with, well, idle time. Mop-headed prepubescents Samu and Matte - presumably lightly fictionalized versions of the boys who play them - swim in the river, lounge in the sun, hang out at a mall and a carnival, and stalk the forest. Sometimes they bike. Like other boys their age, they talk about sex and are prone to spontaneous roughhousing. The passage of time is indeterminate; the sun sets and rises, but the kids’ clothing never changes, and their activities vary little. Applying many of the principles of slow cinema to the coming-of-age film while also folding in docu-fictional realism, Bobbio has come up with something simultaneously leaden and sensuous, totally aimless and yet often absorbing in its ambling youthful languors. Almost perversely vacated of incident or character development, Bobbio seems only to want us to relive the dilated temporality and affects of childhood, using his opaque but deeply physicalized subjects as surrogates through which to experience the textures of young (male) leisure and bonding. DP Stefano Giovannini depicts the look and feel of afternoon sun on skin with tactile precision; studying the boys’ lithe bodies, at rest and in scrappy, homosocial play, we are transported to a stage of relative disinhibition, of free movement and intimate exploration. If The Cormorants doesn’t just fade away into uneventful nothingness, it’s because Bobbio and Giovanni have captured something pure about their subjects’ dispositions, in the jubilant and seemingly eternal crest of their youth.

The Store

THE STORE   ***1/2

Frederick Wiseman

1983

IDEA:  A look at the flagship Neiman Marcus store in Dallas, Texas.

BLURB:  Normally, one would reasonably expect a documentary set inside the confines of a lavish department store to function as fairly straightforward capitalist critique. This expectation seems to be fed during the film’s opening minutes, as an executive extols the almighty importance of sales, and extravagant apparel multiplies through mirrors into ego-affirming excess. But this is a Frederick Wiseman film, so judgment is suspended; any urge toward a polemical indictment is disarmed by mundane observation. In some ways, this approach makes the film’s view of consumer capitalism even more pointed. Instead of facilely underscoring the outrageous materialism of Neiman Marcus so as to land an easy jab at commodity culture, Wiseman simply shows the store in its quotidian workings, its systems and operations totally naturalized by the employees and customers who live by the logics of commerce. Wiseman does not need to insert didactic exposition or juxtapositions (although some cuts knowingly play up human/product parallels) to demonstrate the fundamental strangeness of a massive corporation, to reveal it as a synecdoche, for better or worse, of a culture elaborately constructed for unceasing consumption. Yet nothing here feels insidious, amazingly, not even a final banquet honoring Stanley Marcus held in front of what looks like a giant reproduction of the Vietnam flag. What one interprets as elitist, cultish, dehumanizing, or myopic is merely implicit, delivered by the apparatuses of consumer capitalism themselves.