The Cow (Matt)

The Cow is the first movie that I have ever seen that was created in and by Iran. It was created in 1969 and is filmed in black and white. In this 105 minute long movie we stay inside a poor village in which live a smattering of country folk. The town's greatest asset is a pregnant cow, owned by the stories main character, Hassan. He absolutely adores this cow, and the director goes to great lengths to make sure we realize this. All is well until a group of bandits appears and starts to bother the town. Hassan has to travel to work for a day and while he is gone the cow dies. It's never made clear exactly how the cow is killed. Hassan, to put it lightly, doesn't take it well. He goes insane and the villagers struggle to save their friend.

I'm afraid that I walk the middle road for this movie. The pros and the cons mixed together to create a very neutral point of view. Lets start with what I didn't like about it.

This move is boring. The first half of the film is dedicated to showing the audience that Hassan really loves his cow. We see him 'ooo' and 'ahh' over it, he gives it a bath and feeds it and makes baby noises at it the entire time. These scenes are long and incredibly boring. Imagine watching a bearded man in black and white cooing at a cow for about 45 minutes, ok now you can skip forward past the entire beginning of the movie. The only other important point of the beginning is that there are a group of bandits around the outside of the town that occasionally raid the villagers livestock. Aside from that however, it's just a dude and a cow in black and white.

The music is a bit obnoxious. I suppose it is culturally sound, and for that reason I should tolerate it, but it sounds in a lot of places just like a dude banging around on pots or plucking a guitar randomly. The melody is hard to obtain. This can be useful in establishing a mood sometimes, sort of like in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but mostly in this film it just made me wonder what the heck was going on in the orchestra pit.

I very much enjoyed the cinematography. It's filmed with very little light and this combined with the black and white and the quality of the film (which appears poor) creates a very ominous mood at night in the village. I'm not positive if this was the directors intent or not but regardless it's amazing. The shots were different from the usual shots that I would expect in a film, and that made it more interesting. This was the high point of the movie for me easily.

I also thought that Ezzatolah Entezami, the actor that played Hassan, was pretty great. He pulled a convincing insanity act, and kept the audience on their toes wondering what he would try and do next. He had good crazy eyes, and was also good at moving in discomforting ways. Just seeing him move made you think he was nuts.

So there you go, two good things and two bad things. I guess to stick with the balance here I'll give this a score of 5 PETA complaints out of 10.

~Matt