Jun

9

a film still from COWC O W

Directed by Guan Hu

Cast: Huang Bo, Yan Ni, a Guernsey

This elegiac film is part comedy in the glorious Jackie Chan tradition, part tragedy—it treats the Japanese invasion of a Chinese village in the second Sino-Japanese war and the after-story with the still breathing remnants of the countryside—and part bromance (buddy-pic) between the protagonist, Huang Bo (Best Actor, Venice International Film Festival; Golden Horse award), and a sweetheart of a black-and-white 'American' cow (Chinese cows are, yes, yellow). It is clearly, too, an anti-war delivery system dressed in an historical epic, but the point is made along the way, no hammer to the head. Before you realize there is a message. The director blends a bleak humanism with a Charlie Chaplinesque tragicomic

Ravishingly photographed in nuanced, chiaroscuro-etched sepia varying with black & white, every frame takes your breath and holds it hostage until replaced by the next eye-pleasing frame. With quiet flash-backs and flash-forwards, COW follows village simpleton Niu Er (Huang) as he reluctantly tends to a stubborn, willful hunk of a cow, amid brigands, Japanese attacks, landmines, hunger and revisits from the enemy, under the impression that he is bound by deed to care for it until the Chinese 8th Battalion comes by to reclaim it. He calls the cow the name of his beloved, murdered villager-wife, the peppery proto-feminist Jiu (I) (played by saucy Yan Ni). Jiu II is a gorgeous hunk of unquartered livestock, immaculately if inadvertently sardonic. The filmmaker captures a brilliant moment in cinema when he photographs the reflected bloom of fiery explosions from afar in the humane cow's glossy right eye. Every scene is a gem of framing and texture, sky and earth, rock and soil, snow and arid war-scarred waste.

Much to marvel at and—slowly—enjoy, this wholly realistic picture of Chinese country life decades ago puts a grin on your face, then beguiles you to the gut, where it soon shivs you at tragic and poignant intervals.

Funny-true story of how Huang Bo got cast in a prior hit. Famed director Ning Hao saw Huang in a film, and thought he was a migrant worker extra, and gave up any hope of hiring him (How do you locate and call a migrant worker? Would he have an agent? Would he live in a house? Would he know how to read?). Only later, when they bumped into each other at the Beijing Film Academy, did he realize Huang wasn't a slobbo hobo.

Go. You have my blessing: Have a COW.

109 minutes; Mandarin; English subtitles


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