Watch The Cow For Free

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Nearing the end of ICM's best of 1969 movie poll,I searched for a final title to view. Seeing a post by fellow IMDber OldAle,I was excited to read praise for an Iran New Wave (INW) title, which led to me going down to the farm.View on the film:Farming closer to the Neo- Realist movement than the French New Wave, writer/director Dariush Mehrjui & cinematographer Fereydon Ghovanlou give the village a dour appearance,where the subtle use of black and white shadows lining the streets reflecting what lays at the dark heart of the village. Lovingly following Hassan's feeding of his cow, Mehrju and Ghovanlou take all that Hassan holds dear with flickering camera moves snapping Hassan's breakdown. Dipping into the dark human horror which would be explored the same year in the Czech New Wave film The Cremator, Mehrjui whips Hassan with inhumane treatment from the the locals, captured in frenzied dissolves, fading to the overlooking figures in a landscape.Born from Gholam-Hossein Saedi's play,the screenplay by Mehrjui features the most prominent edge from the Iran New Wave (INW) via Mehrjui dissection of the greed and pettiness followed by all of the rural locals, with the thought they show towards giving Hassan the bad news,burning into vile outbursts as Hassan's mental state degrades. Becoming completely separated from the villagers, Ezzatolah Entezami gives an incredibly expressive performance as Hassan,whose breakdown is treated with a gradual, earthy realism by Entezami,as Hassan looks in hope of seeing the cow on the field.

Very primitive. Villagers don't speak, they take turns, as if on cue, to SHOUT their lines at the top of their lungs, and in a pronounced Tehrani accent at that. The incessant SHOUTING gets annoying real fast.What makes things worse is that the sound level is the same regardless of the actors' distances from the scene. Someone shouting from the top of a roof several houses away is as loud as someone standing next to you. If you don't look at the screen, you will get the feeling that all actors are standing around a single microphone and shouting into it.This could have been a much better movie in the hands of a more experienced director and crew but as it is, I couldn't stand it. Fast-forwarded through.

Iranian director Daruish Mehrjuti's 1969 masterpiece is an all too forgotten work of film-art in the canon. The piece explores inter-community relationships and the life changing forces of nature, what ties man to his surroundings, better than any contemporary American film could, and as so few American films have. The film follows Hassan, an Irani peasant, who owns the only cow in his village. The tight frames and slow pacing reveals a special relationship between Hassan and his cow. Which creates an especial pressing moral dilemma for the town when they discover the cow dead while Hassan is away. What follows is a dark harrowing vision of the depths of the human psyche and man's dependency on nature for survival. Shot in harsh black and white, it takes on the luscious countryside of Iran and the strength of community and the fallibility of human kindness. Hassan's journey is an engaging, dark tale that has been lauded as a controversial film at Cannes and a difficult digest for modern viewers. But few films pack the emotional intensity of Mehruji's film.

This neglected new wave classic is a fast paced, perfectly edited masterpiece. It rockets along at a thousand miles an hour, and it's impossible to take your eyes off the screen. The shocking opening, of a tormented man having his face smeared with blood by a seemingly military man, sets the stage for an increasingly violent and disturbing movie about one man and his cow, and the hell he descends into.Set in Iran, the basic premise is of two villages, who are constantly stealing each other's cattle, sheep etc. The rival village kills the beloved cow while his owner is away. His friends decide the shock would kill him, and decide to tell him it ran away. However, when he gets back, the shock of its disappearance drives him insane, and he comes to believe that he is in fact the missing cow, even when the villagers tell him the truth. Eventually he is taken into the desert and killed by his former friends, like a cow to the slaughter.You can see why modern Iranian cinema is so slow. It's obviously a reaction against this hyperdelic editing.