"First cow" is a 2020 movie from Kelly Reichardt. It's her 7th feature film.

Like all of Kelly Reichardt's movies, it got critical acclaim but relatively poor user reviews. They requires a certain patience and attention to details but its paying off.

K. R. continues here perfecting her style: low budget, slow, minimalistic, humanist and detail-centered approach.

Neo Western

Western is a flexible and broad genre. In the classic genre, based on the "American Dream" concept, the "righteous self made man" hero wins at the end.

Anti-westerns (revisionist, neo-, psychological) rather show hard human conditions, in difficult environments, and the heroes are not necessarily gun fighting aces.

Soviet Union even produced many popular "Osterns", but that's another story that we may get into some time soon.

The list of these is very long: "Mc Cabe and Mrs. Miller" by Robert Altman (1971). Who has seen it? Want to be screened some time? "Dead Man" by Jim Jarmush (1995) is also a good example.

Second "Western" of K. R., 9 years after "Meek's Cutoff".

Friendship

It's a central theme in the film, as show by the quote by William Blake in the opening credits. "Friendship has made my life so rich".

"Lack of community, or each man for himself, is a bad idea.": typical of the "anti western" theme.

Friendship is almost treated here as a basic of human's needs, like water or bread.

Other topics

Politics

K. R. films are mostly concerned with people living on the margins of the capitalist system.

• She explains that the idea starts with the project, then with the story and the script, then it's during the shooting and editing: where you put the camera, how long a shot lasts, etc. Those details stack up and give a message beyond the story.

Manhood

K. R. likes to make fun of the macho attitudes, it's quite easy.

• She mentioned that women faced lots of issues getting her project financed ("Well, we're not doing women's films.”). Maybe the H. Weinstein scandal and the #metoo campaign helped change this?

First Cow

She wrote the script together with her collaborator and writer Jonathan Raymond. Based on his book "The Half-Life".

Production

Budget of 2M $, ten times more than "Wendy and Lucy". Still a low budget film though: "the more money you take, the more people you have to answer to and the more voices there are".

Box office flop in USA because theaters across the country shut down in yet another Covid lockdown: "I'm resentful of the time we're going to lose going forward just based on stupidity"

Oregon again - K. R. moved to Portland.

Animals

Welcome "Eve" the cow, who did not win an Oscar.

After "Wendy and Lucy", from a dog story to a cow story? Not really.

"The Half-Life" did not feature a cow. "The revelation of the cow was the thing that opened the door to being able to keep all the themes and characters from the novel, and be able to do it in this passage of time that works for my filmmaking". "It was reversed engineered".