The last thing anybody ever expected from a Kelly Reichardt film was a big, dripping, golden slab of food porn. Three decades into her career, the American writer-director has become identified with a kind of ascetic purity, both in terms of her own starkly elegant aesthetic and the quiet, marginalised lives she tends to centre on screen. First Cow, her warmly melancholic and generous-hearted seventh feature, doesn’t break from that tradition, yet it serves up surprising pockets of comfort throughout. Let me just say it plainly: First Cow is a film that hinges significantly on doughnuts. Or “oily cakes,” in the film’s 19th-century frontier parlance: big sunny glops of deep-fried dough, eaten hot, drizzled with honey and dusted with cinnamon. Reichardt’s film lingers on the creation of these humble snacks as if gazing upon jewels in a coalmine: you want to reach into the screen and take one, burning your fingers as you do so.
The oily cakes are the creation of one Otis “Cookie” Figowitz, a shabby, itinerant cook who earns his nickname before he becomes known for sweet treats. With a thankless job catering to a boorish pack of travelling fur trappers, wending their way through the wilds of Oregon in the 1820s, he generally trades in essentials rather than indulgences, made from what he can forage in an unyielding landscape. Originally from Boston, he has his own “go west, young man” dream, albeit on a sensible scale: to open a bakery in San Francisco. So he confides to the sympathetic ear of King-Lu, a Chinese immigrant on the lam, who becomes his lone ally in an unlikely money-making scheme: selling baked goods to the luxury-starved denizens of the Oregon trail, with milk nicked from a wealthy English landowner’s magnificent dairy cow – the first and only one in the region.
Thus does First Cow unfold like an aged, rustic fable or folk legend, passed along to the point that some details have blurred, while any crisp moral has become elusive. Cookie and King-Lu steal from the rich to grow richer themselves and let the community live a little more deliciously: a victimless crime, unless you count that poor, lake-eyed, overmilked cow.
Attentive as ever to the mores and strategies of living on the breadline (or indeed the cakeline) and the prickly interaction between haves and have-nots, Reichardt and her regular co-writer Jonathan Raymond (on whose novel the film is based) have made an exquisite, earthy diorama of American capitalism in miniature. It bristles with political aggravation, but is heated by human tenderness and comradeship: played with gentle wit and grace by John Magaro and Orion Lee, the burgeoning relationship between Cookie and King-Lu is rich in queer possibilities too, as their mutual outsider status blossoms into its own intimate bond.
Reichardt has never been one to over-burden her films with either words or commentary, and in a year of such fraught political significance for the US, one can frame just about any American film of remote consequence as one for the times. Yet First Cow, set 200 years ago, feels more piquantly so than most: a calm, clear-eyed observation of national traditions of ownership and isolation, the rules designed to keep society’s outcasts out. It begins with a present-day exhumation, as literal bones of the past are tripped upon and brought to light. The historical fiction that ensues makes us ponder how much or how little has changed in the intervening centuries, and how different the prospects for a Cookie or a King-Lu — alone or together — would be in Trump’s America. One thing we know: those doughnuts would still sell like hot, oily cakes.
