Review by Jamie Sellers 

What springs to mind when you think of buddy movies? The Odd Couple? Butch and Sundance? Thelma and Louise? Maybe one of those modern Hollywood comedies where Jim Carrey, Will Ferrell or Owen Wilson and An Other gurn, break wind a lot and channel their inner infant? Well, it sure has a chequered history, the buddy movie. A certain degree of hamming is always quite likely.

And then along comes First Cow, the latest offering from the always-interesting director Kelly Reichardt (Meek’s Cutoff, Certain Women). No ham here! We’re introduced to Cookie and King Lu, two drifters coming together in Oregon in the early 1800s. Cookie (John Magaro) is a put-upon chef, charged with foraging for food to keep happy a gang of uncouth fur trappers, and who one night covertly offers clothes and shelter to King Lu (Orion Lee), a Chinese immigrant on the run following a fatal altercation with some Russians. When their paths later cross again, Lu offers Cookie a place to stay at a little shack he’s found, and spying a single cow in a nearby forest, Cookie starts sneaking out after dark to milk it (with Lu as his lookout man), in order to make “oily cakes”. The entrepreneurial Lu suggests selling the cakes at market, and they’re soon a roaring success.

When a pompous Englishman, the Chief Factor (Toby Jones, in a role that might have been written just for him) gets wind of their venture, he samples the cakes and declares, all misty-eyed, that they taste of South Kensington. He invites Cookie to bake a dessert for an upcoming meeting he’s hosting with a local captain and a Native American chief. It soon transpires that the Chief Factor has a single cow (its mate and calf having died en route to his property), and he’s mystified as to why it’s hardly producing any milk…

As with many of Kelly Reichardt’s films, First Cow is shot in the rural Northwest, and adapted from part of a novel by her regular collaborator and Oregon native Jonathan Raymond. And like many of the others, it’s but a small story. But it’s also captivating, with every scene a joy to watch, and the casting of Magaro and Lee, neither a household name, as the two central characters, is perfect. There’s a beautiful naturalness to their performances, with the gentle-natured Cookie nervous, pensive, and King Lu the slyly dynamic, slightly reckless one. As soon as I saw it the first time, I wanted to watch it again. And when I eventually did, it didn’t disappoint.

In the last HIP, you may have read my raving about After Love, and now I’m saying see First Cow at all costs. It’s not always like this. I wouldn’t waste valuable space trashing films of little merit, but with the likes of Another Round, Limbo, Surge, Apples and others, it’s been a pretty decent film year, and for me, First Cow tops them all. Catch them all when you can! Support your local cinema!

• First Cow screens at the Electric Palace, Hastings, on 9th and 10th September.

Had cinemas been open to capacity all year, a movie like After Love – Kent-born writer-director Aleem Khan’s intriguing drama – would certainly have garnered more attention and been easier to track down. If you like interesting independent films, and don’t need explosions every five minutes, this is one you shouldn’t let slip through the cracks. Come to think of it, it does have explosions, but of a less pyrotechnic sort.

I mainly know lead actor Joanna Scanlan from potty-mouthed political satire The Thick of It, and from Getting On, the quietly brilliant hospital sitcom she co-wrote and starred in with Jo Brand and Vicki Pepperdine. A quick browse through her CV reminds me I saw her in supporting roles in Girl with a Pearl Earring, Notes on a Scandal, and In the Loop. And there are a host of other British TV and film productions I would certainly have missed, but where I expect she was as reliably good. Nevertheless, After Love presents her with a lead role in which she shows a degree of emotional depth that previously she rarely got the chance to display.

Scanlan is Mary, a recently widowed converted Muslim living in Dover, who makes a shattering discovery. Among the possessions of her late ferry captain husband Ahmed, she finds a French woman’s ID card and a series of anonymous and unanswered texts. Seems he’d lived a whole separate life across the Channel, apparently over a number of years. But when Mary sets off on a journey to Calais to either confront, or possibly break the news of her husband’s death to the other woman, Genevieve (Nathalie Richard), she finds she’s unprepared for the moment. Meeting on the doorstep and still wearing her veil, she’s tongue-tied, not helped by her lack of French, and is assumed by Genevieve to be applying for the position of a domestic. Before we know it, Mary is scrubbing the steps, sorting through Ahmed’s (other) wardrobe, and imagining the life he enjoyed on his periods away from home.

From here on we’re with Mary all the way, trying to imagine what’s going on in her head and, upon each new revelation, wondering which way she’ll go. Earlier in the film we see her among Ahmed’s family after he’s laid to rest, with no sign of her own relatives. She really is alone now. Scanlan’s performance is often wordless, but her eyes and face convey so much. Her marriage, her religion, everything she thinks she knows is questioned. It’s a devastating unravelling of her life and identity – and it’s only part of the story.

A shot of Mary standing in her hijab on the white cliffs of Dover looking out is one of several arresting and thought-provoking images in the film. There’s a lot going on here. Joanna Scanlan is on screen in almost every scene, and never less than captivating. A few years ago, Olivia Colman was elevated to national treasure status after appearing in Paddy Considine’s harrowing Tyrannosaur. Scanlan’s turn in After Love is deserving of similar plaudits.

• After Love screens at the Electric Palace, Hastings, on 2nd September and will be followed by a Director Q+A. https://www.electricpalacecinema.com/whats-on/after-love

Jack in the Green may be a pre-lockdown Hastings memory, but many other weird and wonderful May Day events take place around the country … as Jamie Sellers discovered when he visited the ‘Homer Sykes: Once a Year’ exhibition at the Lucy Bell gallery in St Leonards.

Its opening appropriately coinciding with the early May Bank Holiday, Homer Sykes: Once a Year is a photographic documentation of Britain’s many strange folkloric customs and traditions. The images on display, dating mostly from the early 1970s, are from May Day events, but also from holidays throughout the calendar – wherever and whenever the Brits dress up and parade, shout a lot, hit things down hills, chase elaborately costumed individuals through villages, and most inevitably end up clutching some sort of alcoholic libation at the day’s end. Many depict celebrations of traditions whose meaning has been long lost in the mists of time, while others have, over the years, been slightly modified in the interests of safety.

Burry Man, South Queensferry
PICTURE: Homer Sykes

Take the 14th century Haxey Hood Game, played in the titular Lincolnshire parish on 6th January, and commemorating the rescue of a Lady’s riding
hood. Probably the oldest surviving tradition in England, it begins with singing and drinking in a pub, before a ‘Fool’ makes a run for it. He is caught by the ‘Boggins’ (still with me?) and tells the crowd the legend of the hood, before he is ‘smoked’. Homer Sykes’ image shows a very 1972 Fool, face painted, holding court, while a bale behind him is lit by the grown-ups, and fascinated children look on. The Hood Game follows, as a hessian sack is pushed for several hours by around 200 people until it lands in one of the pubs in either Haxey or neighbouring Westwoodside.

Sykes’ photos show The Burry Man, the centrepiece of an August ritual in South Queensferry, Edinburgh, being walked around the town’s boundaries. He’s clad, head to foot, in burrs, and walked for over nine hours. The subject, a gravedigger by trade, doesn’t look overly comfortable in his costume. The tradition may, like The Green Man, relate to rebirth, or it may be intended to ward off evil spirits. One look at The Burry Man would probably do that. A second, and even more utterly bizarre image in the exhibition, shows him at a bar, sucking whiskey through a straw while still in full costume, flanked by two helpers. If you didn’t read the photo caption first, you’d swear they were about to do him in. Hasn’t the man suffered enough already, I wondered? 

It’s the sense of time, as well as place and tradition that make these monochrome images so special. While something peculiar or idiosyncratic is at the centre of the photograph, normal 1970s life is going on all around it, suits and ties, tank tops and anoraks, wet pavements and cloudy skies.

Sykes is a widely exhibited documentary photographer. Among his numerous projects, his recording of our eccentric annual celebrations is his longest ongoing work. His 1977 book Once a Year, Some Traditional British Customs was republished in 2016 with 50 previously unseen images, and the updated volume is on sale during the exhibition run.

• Homer Sykes: Once a Year is on at Lucy Bell Fine Art Photography, 46 Norman Road, St Leonards TN38 0EJ until 26th June 2021.