‘Vaca’, a documentary by Andrea Arnold presented at Cannes, is an immersive experience that plunges us into the hell of livestock farming, where animals only stop suffering with death
When we think of a cow, we think of the image of Milka chocolate, with rural pastures between snow-capped peaks where cows with cowbells graze serenely. We don’t suspect what’s behind the milk carton that we keep in the fridge – or rather, we don’t want to think about it too much. ‘Vaca’ shows it to us without raising his voice or resorting to grandeur. Britain’s Andrea Arnold’s gamble is to put us in the shoes and long-suffering udders of Luma, a reluctant tenant farmer on a large farm in the south of England.
Presented at the Cannes Festival and the inaugural film at the Seville Festival, ‘Vaca’ comes to our screens amid controversy after the Minister of Consumption, Alberto Garzón, criticized the livestock industry with thousands of animals in the newspaper ‘The Guardian’ . The European Commission introduced a bill last Tuesday to tighten environmental criteria with the aim of reducing ammonia and methane emissions from macro farms; Poultry, pork and beef facilities with more than 100 units are currently responsible for 60% of ammonia emissions and 43% of methane emissions from livestock production in the European Union.
‘Vaca’ is not a documentary in the style of La 2. There is no narrator, no labels or a voice-over. We witness the birth of a calf whose eye stares into the camera as soon as it emerges from its mother’s womb, as if questioning us viewers. Luma licks the animal for a moment, then it is pushed away from her. Later we will see how the calf is dehorned, that is, burn the horns before sprouting with a hot iron, so that the livestock that are in the stables cannot hurt each other or the farmers. The main character will have other calves and they will all suffer the same fate.
Luma’s routine takes place in a tormented endless loop between the fences and barriers of a stable covered in mud, shit and straw. Only in one scene do the cows go outside to eat fresh grass and look at the starry sky at night. Luma is not so much an animal as a factory of moisture and meat. The milk is sucked out, the vet checks it and releases a new calf. Arnold sticks the camera to the animal in such a way that the cow sometimes hits the director of photography. The director is more interested in the bellowing and breathing of the cattle than the farm workers (we barely see their faces), who behave not cruelly, but the mechanical coldness of those who handle things and not living things.
The director’s strategy of ‘Fish Tank’ and ‘Wuthering Heights’ is to humanize this cow, which bellows more than the others, as if to rebel against her fate. When the end comes, not because it’s expected, it’s less shocking. Luma is the link in an industrial chain in which there is only room for productivity. In ‘Cow’ the farm is a prison and you can only escape from it with death. Arnold counters the coldness of wildlife documentaries with flashes of lyricism, like those fireworks in the distant night, or the pop songs playing on the cattle ranch, from Garbage to Billie Eilish, providing the sarcastic counterpoint. ‘Vaca’ is an immersive experience in which we share the fear of an animal.
Source: La Verdad
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