Andrea Arnold’s documentary debut, featuring a loveable dairy cow, prompts difficult questions about raising animals entirely for human benefit
, her fifth feature and first documentary, Arnold turns her trademark unflinching gaze on a subject that is both familiar and entirely other: a cow named Luna on a cattle farm in the English countryside.follows Luna in her day-to-day life, from grazing and mating to birthing and milking. It is about as immersive and visceral a depiction of a non-human being as one can imagine, with Arnold filming from Luna’s perspective as much as possible and using zero narration.
For many viewers, the first surprise may be the immediate, easy charisma of her subject: in an early scene, Luna holds the camera’s gaze, mooing insistently, in such a way that it leaves the audience in no doubt about her curiosity and appraising intelligence. Likewise, shots of her caring for her just-born calf and taking obvious pleasure from an open field suggest aFor an essentially quiet film, sound is used to great effect in.
, as does the sequence where Luna is being milked on Christmas morning by a farmer wearing a Santa hat, set to the sound ofThis is no hard-bitten slaughterhouse exposé: it is clear that Luna is well cared for, even loved. But the life of a dairy cow is, by definition, one that is punctured with sudden violence. Thoughmay not depict the industrial-scale horrors of animal production, Arnold doesn’t shy away from depicting the indignities and intrusions that feature in a dairy cow’s world.
The end, when it comes, manages to be at once inevitable and shocking – the harshest possible awakening from the dreamlike state viewers have been lulled into. It encapsulates the film’s understated political point: that, from beginning to end, this is a life led entirely on humanity’s terms,.
In honouring the sacrifice of one farm animal, Arnold quietly but insistently invokes the spectre of far more – many of which aren’t treated with the same dignity as Luna, even if we choose to remain ignorant of the details.
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