At one screening people were crying, one person fainted, somebody was sick, somebody had a panic attackĪstonishingly, three of her four movies – Red Road, Fish Tank and American Honey – have won the Jury prize at the Cannes film festival. After it finishes, we find ourselves rewinding the film in our head, reinterpreting all that has gone before – or simply watching it again. In her first full-length work, Red Road, we only begin to understand towards the end of the film why protagonist Jackie has been stalking a newly released prisoner. She pretends she is looking after the kids for a friend and leaves them outside the pub to play without telling her date, which results in all kinds of chaos.Īrnold’s narratives are rarely linear and usually elliptical, leaving us to fill in the missing details.
In the autobiographical Wasp, which won the Oscar for best live action short in 2004, a single mother of four is asked out for the first time in years. Her films are like this, too: composed of fragments, open to different interpretations. I was intrigued as to whether we would be able to see her consciousness if we followed her long enough.” Why did she make Cow? “I wanted to show a non-human consciousness. Arnold and her team spent four years, on and off, filming her. It’s a huge job they do.” She chose Luma because she was told she had a big personality and was feisty. “I thought a cow would be interesting because they work so hard, getting pregnant and giving milk their entire lives.
But it is one of the most beautifully crafted and tender portraits of a life you are likely to see.Īrnold, who started her professional life as a rollerskating TV presenter on the children’s Saturday show No 73, began thinking about documenting an animal’s life nine years ago. It is hardly a thriller (though the ending is pure Tarantino). A ndrea Arnold’s films are known for their spare dialogue, and in her first documentary it is more pared-backed than ever: Cow consists of 94 minutes of moos, with the odd off-camera interjection from farmhands.
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