Frontier Lives

First Cow has finally been released for viewing in Spanish cinemas. It is a film by the American director Kelly Reichardt which garnered praise after it was shown in the States at the start of the pandemic and at festivals which were occasionally made accessible on digital platforms. Hopefully,  the lifting of restrictions arising from the pandemic, combined with the return of festivals marking the cinema industry’s calendar —Malaga these past few days and next Cannes— will curb the industrial disorder that film buffs have been putting up with for the past year and a half. For the time being we can meet up again in theatres with the endearing viewer who crushes his bag of nibbles or with the twosome who offers a running critique on all of the twists and turns of the plot as if they were sitting at home on their sofa. Better than nothing!

As I was saying: Kelly Reichardt has returned to the western with this film, which basically means returning to an exploration of life on the frontier in the 19th-century American West. It is not a genre unknown to her, for Meeks’s Cutoff already told the story of the hard itinerary several pioneer families had followed in seeking a place to settle. That story was set in 1845 and it offered a reflection on American mixed-breeding; now the  director is going a little farther back in time to transport us —by means of a grand, ethnographically faithful  recreation of the past— to 1820, a time when Oregon, where the drama takes place, is not even a part of the United States.  As Carlos Heredero has explained in detail in the May issue of the journal Caimán, its incorporation into the Union did not come about until 1859, when the British-American condominium that controlled that wild territory, in a statute of some exceptionality, was dissolved. In fact, the better part of of the film unfolds in Fort Vancouver, located 140 miles from where the majestic Columbia River empties into the Pacific, and where the main headquarters of the Hudson Bay Company is found. The latter is a firm for the trading of animal pelts that turns the location into a Company Town, a city that crops up around a firm owning the surrounding lands. We Europeans will be surprised to learn how high a percentage of the land today in the US and Great Britain is still in private hands. Allowing for differences, the closure of a company town sets in motion the recent —and inferior— Nomadland, even if here the adjective “corporative” has a very different meaning.

There is cause for celebration in the fact that Kelly Reichardt, the most interesting female director on the contemporary scene after Claire Denis, has returned to a fascinating film genre, one which has marked the history of cinema as well as the history of American self-understanding; it is no accident that the latter is linked to the development of cinema as a medium of mass communication. Understandably, there might be viewers who at this point in time run in the other direction and who won’t even try to understand the genre: nonetheless, any rigorous approach to cinema as an art form, which has its own in history, demands at the very least that we get to know it. A film like First Cow might possibly be of help in bringing the western closer to viewers who are not drawn to old stories of cowboys and outlaws, now that the shine of the old star system and of 1950s Technicolor are both things of the past.

Anyway, Reichardt was already, by other means,  telling us stories about life on the frontier: in Old Joy, in Night Moves, and in Wendy and Lucy. But here she does so by turning directly to the imaginary of the western, even if, naturally, she does so from a personal perspective in line with the demythification of the genre,  a trend which which had crept already into some of the films from the 50s, grown more pronounced in the 60s and taken over productions from the 70s. The filmmaker from Portland, who is Miami-born (her wonderful thriller from 1994, River of Grass was set in Florida), told Babelia that masters Anthony Mann and Bud Boetticher are her favorite directors of westerns; both are known for the naked physicality of their films, in which landscape plays a decisive role in capturing their solitary protagonists’ tormented psychology. In First Cow, however, the echoes are different and refer chiefly to the Robert Altman of McCabe & Mrs. Miller and the slow rhythm of the late Monte Hellman’s westerns. Having said that, the film is her own and could not be anybody else’s.

Its beginning is already a statement of intentions. To start with, there are movie credits,  set to the rhythm of an excellent musical theme by William Tyler, the author of a restrained soundtrack. We begin by learning who has made the film, which is becoming less and less frequent. Let’s see if producers also find it in their heart to recover the old way to close,  The End. The first image tells us that the format of the film is 4:3, which shies away from big landscape shots and adapts well to the woodlands typical of the northwestern United States. But what we see from the outset is a container ship of great dimensions crossing a river: the symbol par excellence of the past decades’ globalization of trade. Weren’t we watching a western? Looking at the boat is a young woman who is walking her dog along Sauvie Island, on the Columbia River, and it is the dog who sniffs out something hidden in the earth. Prompted by a natural curiosity, the girl begins to dig and after a few hours she finally unearths two skeletons, one lying on top of the other, of whose age or origin she hasn´t a clue. Who were they? There is a cut to the past, a bold jump back two centuries which suggests that Reichardt and her co-scriptwriter Jonathan Raymond — whose novel The Half-Life is the basis for the film —also want to tell us something about the present.This is not new as far as westerns go, for from the very beginning they have addressed contemporary America, reflecting its traumas or worries. And the same can be said of First Cow, whose ambition in meaning, however, does not hamper narrative flow: the meaning can be deduced from the narration but at no time does it choke it to death.

Those who want to give the film a feminist reading, however, are wide of the mark. In the aforementioned interview in Babelia, Reichardt herself dismisses this interpretation and shows that she is not bound to these ideological constraints. Making the leading man a baker rather than a gunman is, no doubt about it, a welcome innovation: it is as if Reichardt took all the secondary characters that fill in the background of the classic western and brought them centerstage (like the character Elias who is played by Bob Dylan himself in Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid). From there to saying that the film promotes a new masculinity, though, strikes us as an exaggeration. Among other things, because that alternative does not seem to hold very well for the brutal environment of the early 19th century.

Reichardt tells the story of a cook who arrives at Fort Vancouver and strikes up a friendship with a party of trappers and a Chinese immigrant, King-Lu, who has managed to get away from some Russians that —he says— killed his former companion. That fort, consisting of a saloon and a trading post, is for Reichardt “the seeds of a city” (as she explained in an interview, translated in Caimán, from the March/April 2020 issue of the American journal Film Comment, which was sadly closed down during the pandemic). And there, under the aegis of the head of the fur trade, played with his usual masterful touch by the Londoner Toby Jones, the two friends dream of a stroke of fortune that will allow them to make money. Between the two of them is forged an easygoing link based on camaraderie and domesticity, of the kind that Reichardt treats with such delicacy in films like Old Joy. Cookie, as the baker is nicknamed, is mild-mannered and tends toward resignation; King-Lu is a go-getter who does not resign himself to mere survival: he dreams of opening a hotel in San Francisco and other entrepreneurial affairs. Together they form a pair that also makes up part of the tradition of the western, in which a lone hero has often ridden beside a more or less skillful companion.

In this case the skill in question is a culinary one and it represents the path that Cookie and King-Lu choose to go down in order to get ahead in the hard life of the frontier. King-Lu boasts an enthusiasm that translates into an anachronistic historical consciousness: “History isn´t here yet. It’s coming, but we got here early this time.” The notion of a land of opportunity seemed more plausible in the southern territories, where you could plant or raise cattle: in the impenetrable woods of the north, trade is in its infancy and its main objective are the beavers, whose fur and oil are easily sold. The arrival of the first cow is a small major event, even if its acquisition is owing to the vanity of the head of trade, who is bent on serving tea with milk to the well-travelled ship captain whom he receives in his big house in order to talk about the latest fashion in Paris. This is the context in which Cookie and King-Lu want to do business, but the latter spells the problem out with clarity: you can only begin by seeking the help of somebody who will put up the capital. Or by committing a crime.

And that is what they do. In order to make the toothsome pastries that recall our buñuelos [deep-fried, “oily” cakes] Cookie and King-Lu milk the head of trade’s cow every night, which she goes along with peacefully and with the meek look on her face that has come to mark all bovines. Reichardt has said that she is interested in animals as witnesses; at different points in the film an owl appears which, from its perch on a tree, contemplates reality around it. In the novel the business to which the protagonists devote themselves is the trade in castor oil. The change in the script which Reichardt pushed for is right on target and gives rise to scenes with a certain comic appeal: the pastry’s success leads to long queues in Fort Vancouver worthy of any fashionable establishment on the streets of Portland or New York, the kind of phenomenon that made Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld laugh in the memorable episode of Seinfeld devoted to the “soup Nazi”. Such is the success of the product made by the two friends and business partners that they let greed get the better of them: taking excessive risks, they are discovered by the head of trade, who has been egged on by the clever ship Captain. If the former is so powerful that he cannot conceive that anyone could steal from him, the latter is suspicious from the first of anyone who makes quality pastry without having a cow of their own.

The punishment is implacable: the head of trade’s gunmen search for our anti-heroes in order to kill them. It is also out of all proportion, inasmuch as no law would penalize such a minor crime with a sentence like that. Here the frontier quality of Fort Vancouver makes itself felt, where in fact there is no other law than the one applied by the Hudson Bay Company; there is no sheriff capable of enforcing the rules, if there are any. Although the initial look of the settlement had suggested a sort of spontaneous adhesion to the rules of community life and exchange, in line with John Locke’s thesis about a social contract prior to the political contract, the reality is harsher and points to domination by the discretional power of the head of trade and his employees: private revenge has not yet been abolished. In their attempt to flee, the two friends split up: Cookie takes a fall that knocks him unconscious and King-Lu negotiates  with an Indian to travel down the river by canoe in exchange for the buttons on his coat. After a scene in which Cookie starts to rave and imagines he is besieged by starving wolves who keep him from getting out of the house where he has taken refuge, the two friends are reunited and set out on foot, with their savings in their hands, in the direction of the pier, where they will catch a boat to San Francisco. Apparently out of danger, they lie down to rest in the same position in which the solitary passerby finds them two centuries later. We know that they will die, but we don´t even hear the shots: the two friends’ dreamy repose closes the film with an ellipsis whose endpoint is our present day.

Going back to the boat that opens the film, it becomes clear what the themes are that Reichardt wants to deal with: the initial formation of the United States, the commercializing impulse of the 19th century and the plundering of the natural world as a feature that is shared by the expansion into the West and the development of liberal modernity.  “The beavers are forever,” says the head of trade during the meeting he shares with the captain and the Chinook Indian chief, who is played by Gary Palmer (the unforgettable Nobody of Dead Man, a western in which Jim Jarmusch explores that same wooded terriitory to the rhythm of Neil Young’s inspired guitar). But they are not forever; neither were the buffalos, as Robert Brooks told us in The Last Hunt. But the sense of natural abundance that had been created by the accidental discovery of America four hundred years ago, the impression that environmental historian Donald Worster considers decisive for the construction of a social imaginary of progress, had not disappeared. Were there not beaver everywhere? Their extinction was considered unthinkable and, in the worst possible case, irrelevant.

“The world wants hazelnuts”, says King-Lu when he indulges in one of his commercial fantasies. Which is to say: he himself is a product of that mixture of need and adventurism that accounts for the great migrations of the 19th century. There are a lot of Chinese in the westerns! James Caan disguises himself as one in a scene from Eldorado. Cookie and King-Lu are thus victims of the business urge that Reichardt reproaches their opponents with: they don´t know when to call it a day either. And it’s understandable, for, as the initial scenes in the film show, in which Cookie serves as the cook for a group of trappers who are desperate to get to where they are going, a person could die of starvation if he didn´t catch something in time. In fact, scarcity marks the prices in a place that is lacking in established currency and where almost anything of value is accepted as a unit of exchange: a glass of whisky costs two silver coins and a pickle goes for three.

Once in a while Reichardt’s critical intentions run away with her and the director slips into a kind of exercise in retrospective ventriloquism. When the head of trade chats with the captain in his big house, they both discuss in detail the decisions that had been taken by the latter after an attempted mutiny. For the former, the rebel ought to have been executed; the captain maintains that he would thereby have lost a valuable force inside the ship. And the head of trade, for whom the debate is settled, extracts a general lesson: “Any question that can´t be calculated is not worth asking.” That, of course, is what the screenwriters say: they are saying it to us, speaking to the gallery. But this is a minor reproach to make: the film is a brilliant recreation of an inaugural moment in which a wild territory, barely inhabited by human beings, is hurled into the savage river of history, which is headed for liberal globalization and that brutal convergence with deep time that constitutes the Anthropocene. And all of this is symbolized here by a simple cow, that first cow of the westerns that seems to be asking us questions with its big dark eyes.