The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future, 2022.
Directed by Francisca Alegria.
Starring Leonor Varela, Mia Maestro, Alfredo Castro, Marcial Tagle, Enzo Ferrada, and Luis Dubó.
SYNOPSIS:
Cecilia travels to her father’s farm after he has a heart attack. Back in her childhood home, Cecilia is met by her long-deceased mother whose presence brings to life a painful past chorused by the natural world around them.
Francisca Alegria follows up her acclaimed short film And the Whole Sky Fit in the Dead Cow’s Eye – which played Sundance 2017 – with a feature debut that’s part-environmental polemic, part-magical realist fable in the vein of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and entirely a tribute to nature’s beauty.
This slyly, weirdly moving tale of traumas both familial and global may not be subtle – opening with a choral song speaking of pollution, mortality, and the eventuality of everything returning to dust – but examines the relationship between humans and nature through a singularly heightened lens.
Alegria’s film unfolds in south-central Chile, where a pulp factory is polluting the Cruces River, causing fish to die en masse and threatening to irreparably change the entire ecosystem. But one day, Magdalena (Mía Maestro) washes up among the fish, decades after she supposedly committed suicide, as proves quite the shock to her widowed husband and daughter Cecilia (Leonor Varela). Magdalena’s mere presence causes a tidal shift in both the literal environment and her family’s ongoing dynamic.
Director Alegria clearly isn’t much interested in the literal mechanics of Magdalena’s impossible resurrection; they’re never really explained, beyond mild hints that the universe has basically willed her back to life at a time when it most needed to happen.
The “why?” of the movie is concerned less with how she returned from the dead or the peculiar effect she appears to exert on modern technology – interfering with phones and even stopping a man’s pacemaker – but the means through which she came to die. This is particularly important for Cecilia, who worries that her trans daughter Tomas (Enzo Ferrada Rosati) may follow in the same suicidal footsteps.
The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future is a tonally intriguing stew that even appears to flirt periodically with horror; grotesque montages of cows being milked and mooing with apparent anguish aren’t entirely dissimilar to A24’s recent joint Lamb, and the inclusion of legitimately haunting choral music, sung by the animals themselves no less, doesn’t hurt either. Yet Alegria’s film mostly settles for being a fantasy-drama about family, generational trauma, and our impact on the world both literal and spiritual.
This is a quietly ambitious film assembled on an evidently low budget; Inti Briones’s exacting cinematography captures Chile’s beautiful scenery, matched perfectly with deliciously crunchy sound design throughout. It perhaps slightly overextends itself even with a fair 98-minute runtime – as is most evident in the final stretch – but some of the bleaker later revelations certainly hit with a bruising impact.
Even when it’s a little on the slow side, the efforts of the cast tend to win out; as Magdalena, Mía Maestro is an incredibly striking presence who has to say so much with her facial expressions and sheer physicality, as she’s wordless for almost the entire film. We feel her spectral anguish and sadness, accented by that of her daughter, played with similarly appealing resolve by Leonor Varela. Enzo Ferrada Rosati meanwhile gives a remarkably empathetic, possibly lived-in performance as Cecilia’s trans daughter struggling to be accepted by her mother.
This is a film that wears the scars of loss and abandonment on its sleeves, yet isn’t without occasional comedy-of-confusion to ensure it doesn’t descend into an artsy misery-fest. Francisca Alegria’s transfixing magical realist drama offers nothing if not a unique vision through which to examine grief for both family and our polluted Earth.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Shaun Munro – Follow me on Twitter for more film rambling.
