When we think of a cow, the picture of Milka chocolate comes to mind, with bucolic meadows between snowy peaks where little cows with bells graze serenely. We do not suspect –or rather we do not want to think too much– about what is behind the tetrabrick of milk that we keep in the fridge. ‘Vaca’ shows us this without raising our voices or resorting to tremendousness. The bet of the British Andrea Arnold is to put ourselves in the shoes and the long-suffering udders of Luma, a tenant in spite of herself of a macro-farm in the south of England.
Presented at the Cannes Festival and the opening film at the Seville Festival, ‘Vaca’ arrives on our screens in full controversy after the Minister of Consumption, Alberto Garzón, criticized the livestock industries with thousands of animals in the newspaper ‘The Guardian ‘. The European Commission presented this past Tuesday a legislative proposal to toughen environmental criteria with the aim that macro-farms emit less ammonia and methane; Currently, poultry, pig and cattle facilities with more than one hundred heads are jointly responsible for 60% of ammonia emissions and 43% of methane from livestock in the European Union.
‘Vaca’ is not a documentary in the style of those on La 2. There is no narrator, no labels or a voiceover. We witness the birth of a calf whose eye stares at the camera as soon as it leaves its mother’s womb, as if she were addressing us to the audience. Luma licks the creature for a short time: it is immediately pushed away from her. Later we will see how they dehorn the calf, that is, burn the horns before they sprout with a hot iron so that the bovines crowded in the stables cannot hurt each other or the farmers. The protagonist will have other calves and they will all suffer the same fate.
pop songs
Luma’s routine takes place in a harrowing endless loop between the fences and barriers of a stable carpeted with 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 fluid and meat. She gets milk suckled, vet checked, and unloads a new calf. Arnold glues the camera to the animal to the point that at times the cow hits the cinematographer. The director is more interested in the lowing and breathing of the cow than the farm employees (we barely see their faces), who do not behave cruelly, but with the mechanical coldness of those who deal with things and not with living beings.
The strategy of the director of ‘Fish Tank’ and ‘Wuthering Heights’ consists of humanizing this cow that moos more than the others, as if she wanted to rebel against her destiny. When the end comes, not because expected stops being less impressive. Luma is the link in an industrial chain in which there is only room for productivity. In ‘Vaca’ the farm is a prison and you can only escape from it with death. Arnold fights the coldness of nature documentaries with flashes of lyricism, like those fireworks in the distant night, or the pop songs that sound on the cattle farm, from Garbage to Billie Eilish, which provide a sarcastic counterpoint. ‘Vaca’ is an immersive experience in which we share the anguish of an animal.
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