Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Francisca Alegria
Starring: Mía Maestro, Leonor Varela, Alfredo Castro, Marcial Tagle, Enzo Ferrada
You're unlikely to see too many movies this year as oddly confounding
as director Francisca Alegria's feature debut,
The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future. If that title has you rolling your eyes in expectancy of arthouse
pretension, well, you're half right. While Alegria's movie is far from a
mainstream crowd-pleaser, it does bear the surprising influence of
Spielberg and his 1980s Hollywood contemporaries.
Believed to have drowned herself in Chile's Cruces River several
decades ago, Magdalena (Mía Maestro) emerges from the water like
the titular sword in John Boorman's Excalibur, looking the same age as when she rode her motorcycle into the river.
Wandering silently to the town she once called home, Magdalena comes
upon her husband, Enrique (Alfredo Castro). The shock of seeing
his assumed dead wife lands Enrique in hospital, with his daughter
Cecilia (Leonor Varela) subsequently arriving to help out on the
family dairy farm with her brother Bernardo (Marcial Tagle).
One by one, Magdalena approaches her family members, prompting wildly
different reactions. Seemingly possessed by guilt, Enrique commands what
he believes is a ghost sent to torment him to leave him alone. Feeling
betrayed by her mother, who she believes left her alone as a
seven-year-old, Cecilia has a similar reaction. Conversely, Cecilia's
trans daughter Tomas (Enzo Ferrada) embraces Magdalena's
presence, having always viewed her as a kindred spirit, unable to
survive in their stifling family.
Magdalena has a strange effect on both the natural environment,
seemingly able to communicate with wildlife, and electrical devices,
which flicker and spark as she passes by. The latter moments recall all
those fish out of water sci-fi movies of the '80s, and in her own way
Magdalena is similar to E.T. in arriving to heal a damaged family. Her
kinship with animals also made me think of Jeff Bridges in
Starman. Wandering around naked and in silence, she recalls the taciturn
antagonists of films like The Terminator and
Lifeforce. There's even a scene where she finds herself in a disco, a staple of
'80s fish out of water movies. Maestro has a suitably ethereal presence,
her reactions prompted more by her environment than to other humans, as
though she herself had become an animal. It's a performance not unlike
that of Scarlett Johansson in Under the Skin.
It's when the film delves into Magdalena's relationship with nature
that it becomes a little chintzy. Scenes of fish and livestock mouthing
along to a foreboding, apocalyptic song represent the cringiest
singalong since Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, coming off like an outtake from a Muppets movie. Is it necessary to
anthropomorphise animals to make the point that we should maybe treat
them better?
For all its moody slow cinema beats,
The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future ultimately
proffers that simple message, that we need to care for our environment
or the damage we wrought will come back to haunt us. The Chilean
landscape is beautifully photographed and certainly makes the point that
it deserves preserving, but I just wish the film found a more involving
way of getting that notion across.
