First Cow

Like all of Kelly Reichardt's movies, First Cow is quiet, un-dramatic, caring, observationally oriented, and not interested in spectacle. Like her other movies, Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy, it's about friendship, or human beings connecting, both with other human beings, themselves, animals, and nature. Through it's construction, the movie seems to ask its viewer to slow down. It doesn't have any interest in entertaining in the way that films normally do. 

The story is set in the early 1800s in the Northwest - it's a western. Like a Western, it contains all the tropes we're used to: the story concerns two outsiders, and there is violence in the film, but the outsiders, the protagonists, are not violent. They are, in fact, gentle, caring, quiet people who are trying to survive. The film shows the two men doing simple chores: shucking mussels; mixing batter; baking a cake; foraging berries; milking a cow. The main character, Cookie, is a cook/baker, who has traveled with a trapping outfit, only to be abandoned by this outfit: they don't like him. It's clear why - they have no idea what he wants. He doesn't seem to want money or furs or recognition. He isn't aggressive or violent. He wants connection, a friendship, a dignified way of life. When he finds it with King-Lu, another outsider, the friendship that develops is quiet, full of care, and also a risk: it looks different than typical masculine life. These two are domestic outlaws - they have a simple dream, to open a hotel and bakery. Under cover of night, they begin to milk the lone cow in the territory in order to make better tasting biscuits, which they can sell. They're stealing. Outlaws, but outlaws that we've never seen before. There are long stretches in the movie in which there's no dialogue, or very little. We are allowed to watch and participate in this simple, difficult life. As the viewer, we watch as the camera settles on a portion of the wet forests of the Northwest, or as the camera pans along a creek. The sit at a creek and talk about the future. The two main characters (Cookie and King-Lu) share a small shelter, dark but dry, with the forest always visible out the open windows. In the evening, the characters talk slowly in firelight about their simple dreams. It reminds us of another way to be. The slow tension, the attentiveness need to both the natural world and one's actions in it. We are reminded of our own participation in the natural world.  

Nature is the third friend in the story - she provides food, shelter, sustenance. It's easy to forget that we too, in every way, are provided for by nature - we may not be foraging, but the food bought in a grocery store is still naturally derived.

The film is a quiet but dramatic reminder of our connection to the wild: even something as simple as baking a cake can be a dignified, natural activity if it is done with a certain attentiveness. The film reminds us of how to cultivate that attentiveness. Baking a cake is an activity that manifests from the universe itself and connects us to others. In fact, everything we do is this, but we forget it, in the same way we forget ourselves, forget others, and forget what we are: the sentient part of the planet, who, along with it, are struggling to survive.