Vacas [Cows]

Through a cow’s eye

1992

Review: September 30, 2006

Director: Julio Medem

Starring: Emma Suárez, Carmelo Gómez, Ana Torrent, Karra Elejalde, Klara Badiola

Yes, though that will make it even more confusing.

THE SETUP:

Many generations of a family feud in the Basque region.

DISCUSSION:

My current answer for ‘what is your favorite movie?’ [not what I think is the best movie, but my favorite movie] is Lovers of the Arctic Circle by Spanish director Julio Medem. That is of course subject to review, as I haven’t seen it since it came out [it’s on my list], but in the meantime, it one day occurred to me to see which other of his movies I could get my hands on, and that’s how I came upon this one, his first feature film.

We open with a very intense scene of a man chopping wood. Intense because he is wearing no shoes and he is bringing the axe down from above his head to chop just between his bare toes. Seriously, I was more on edge during these scenes than I was during Tzameti.

We then move into an also intense battleground scene during… but here [and throughout] I’m afraid my knowledge of Basque / Spanish history is going to let you down, because I am utterly clueless on the topic. But we’re on a battlefield, that much I know. And one guy hears tell that a friend of his is nearby, and he goes over to meet the friend. Moments later he is shot in the neck. His friend takes blood from the guy’s neck and smears it on himself to make it look as though he is dead, while the man who was shot stares at him, appalled, saying “I’m not dead!” They both end up on a cart of the dead [the other one dead now] and the live one crawls out onto the roadway and escapes. He looks up, and there’s a highly metaphorical cow staring at him. We travel through the cow’s eye to 30 years in the future, where we take up with the relatives and descendants of these two.

But let’s hold on. I remember Lovers of the Arctic Circle being very dream-like and loaded with symbols and metaphorical images, but nowhere near the high degree of portent that many things here are laden with. For example, at one point on the previously-discussed battlefield, there is a very quick sequence in which a bullet hits a copper pot, a man punches it, we see the pot flying through the air, then we see the man’s injured hand. I have no idea what it means, but personally I found it electrifying. This is very much like a few scenes I remember from Lovers, for example, one in which two kids fly forward when their car comes to a sudden stop, and when they bounce back in their seats they are ten years older.

So now it’s 1905 and the descendants of the folks from the beginning are living close to each other, and have a lifelong animosity owing to the “act of cowardice” of the guy who played dead years back. I’m going to call the cowardly family the “dark” family, because they are always in dark shirts, and the others will be the “light” family. Alpha studs from both families excel in chopping wood, although the one from the light family is considered better. I’m sorry I can’t give you character names but, owing to how extremely confusing this thing is, which we will discuss later, I truly have no idea what they are. Anyway, both men like this one beautiful young woman, though she seems to like the light guy better, and they decide to have a log-chopping contest in order to determine who’s better [and win her love]. The contest is remarkable for both the incredible tension in waiting for someone’s toe to get chopped off, and also just: I never expected that I would be watching a movie about a log-chopping contest in a rural Basque village. One of the light guy’s strokes releases a chunk of wood that goes flying into the air and lands in the folds of the beautiful woman’s apron, right over her belly. Now, I hope you know that this means he is going to make her pregnant. He soon does.

We go through a cow’s eye again, at one point seeing a view of a mist-covered valley, and: is this supposed to represent the cow’s mind? When we once again emerge it is ten years later.

Okay, it’s occurring to me that I can never possibly describe all of what’s going on in this movie [because I don’t understand it myself], so I’m just going to hit some major points. At one point the dark guy gets frustrated with chopping and hurls his axe into the forest. The woman from earlier finds it, and the light guy is there, and he fucks her. Then we go ten years later, and she is not married to the light guy, and the dark guy is still pressing her for marriage. At one point, she goes out to meet the light guy in the evening, and after she leaves the dark guy comes in and gets into bed with the boy, runs his fingers through his hair and sings. But the dark guy says he’s her brother, and at one point attacks her, saying “I won’t hurt you, I’m your brother” AS he is on top of her and shaking her violently. More symbolic stuff happens, like a little girl milking a cow talks about how disgusting the milk is, and immediately after a boy with a camera studies her budding breasts. We go through a camera’s eye the same way we go through the cow’s eye. A lot of other stuff happens.

No, I know you’re thinking “how dense can he be, getting so little out of a movie?” but let me tell you, for one, every few minutes or so we jump 10 years into the future, and, get this, the same actors often play wholly different characters. Add to this the foreign language and the historical backdrop [of which I know nothing], and you have a recipe for confusion.

What I do know is that the whole thing is delightfully dreamy, other people have described it as a sort of magical realism, but to me it seems like many things are just given a great symbolic weight, and the photography and editing plays all that up. My best guess is that it’s about the elements in a family that are passed on between generations, and a lot about their connection to the land and the specific place that they’re in. This is why I think he uses the same actors as different characters of different generations, to show how these different generations ARE the same people. I think the cows are used as this living thing that is somewhat impassive and in connection to nature, which stands virtually unchanging and unmoved in conrast to how involved the people are getting in their personal issues. When we go into the cow’s eye and see the misty valley, I think we ARE supposed to be seeing the cow’s mind, which is this wordless visual image that is of nature at its most tranquil and resonant. So this is my best guess.

The friend who I watched it with didn’t think it was much more than a historical thing with a bunch of generations. We both agreed that it would take about five more viewings to even get the basic plot down, but he thought that if we did, it wouldn’t amount to much of anything [which may say more about him as a person…]. I said that we couldn’t even judge, because there was so much of it we couldn’t get. But we both agreed that we were probably NOT going to watch it again any time soon to try to divine its secrets.

Nevertheless, I did enjoy the first two-thirds [until I was so lost it was just pictures going by on a screen], because I liked the dreamy style, but also because it shows something I had never really seen before, which was rural life in the Basque region at the turn of the century. I also never thought I’d be watching a movie about a log-chopping contest in said rural village, so… I think there’s some value in that as well, just seeing something you wouldn’t otherwise see.

SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?

If you can get into the idea that you’ll be seeing something fairly interesting, dreamy and well-made, although you may have no clue what’s going on.

RELATED MOVIES:
LOVERS OF THE ARCTIC CIRCLE is by the same director, and is also dreamy and beautiful, and totally possible to follow. It is currently my favorite movie and is also about the most romantic movie I know of.
SEX AND LUCIA is the next film by the same director, is also quite romantic though a little harder to follow, but features the fucking gorgeous Paz Vega, whose beauty was enough to keep me mesmerized for two hours, regardless of what happened. I need to watch that shit again.