First Cow

- PICKED BY ESTHER -
February 2023

“Kelly Reichardt gives us a terrifically tough and sinewy tale of the old west, shaped by the brutally implacable market forces of capitalism. She and her regular screenwriting collaborator Jonathan Raymond have adapted Raymond’s own 2004 novel The Half-Life. […] A prelude in the present day shows a young woman discovering two human skeletons shallowly buried in Oregon woodland. What is the story here? Reichardt takes us back to the 1820s where “Cookie” Figowitz (John Magaro) is a slippery adventurer who has been hired as a cook in a trapping party but has proved utterly incompetent – at least as far as his aggressive and hungry fellow trappers are concerned. So he splits from them and finds himself befriending an itinerant Chinese worker called King Lu (Orion Lee), and for a while, the pair seem no more than a couple of hobos, finding common cause in their own loneliness. They dream of getting rich as entrepreneurs - and they are not stupid or lazy. But of course any new business needs capital. And how to get it? Why, with that certain special something that is the invisible foundation stone of all great fortunes: a crime. Lu points out that a cow has arrived in the territory: the first cow, and as such the object of exotic fascination. It belongs to the chief factor, an effete and absurd Englishman (Toby Jones), and the pair hatch a bold plan: to creep into the factor’s meadow at the dead of night, milk this cow and use the precious liquid to make ‘oily cakes’.” Read the rest of the Guardian review of this film here. And see the trailer here.