User Reviews

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 movie recalls Pasolini in mind, and also Parajanov.

The subject is as simple as it can be: there is a village, poor and primitive, Hassan is the only one possessing a cow in the village, the cow dies, Hassan gets mentally insane.

Is Hassan mad? Well, obviously. A man who believes that he is no more himself, but his cow, that's madness on all accounts.

Madness? Hassan was living in his own universe ignoring the real world. But here's the point: Hassan had always lived in his own universe - he and his cow. A whole system of memories: events lived together. Natural phenomenons lived together and having a particular significance for them: a whole system of codes and signals. Was it full moon? It meant the cow was thirsty.

This universe could not disappear once the cow was no more. The memories were still in place. The codes and signals were still in place. Was it full moon? It meant the cow was still thirsty.

So Hassan was just defending now this universe of him; only his universe was no more fit with the world. Hence, the madness.

Usually, when the beloved one is no more, the survivor is tempted to imagine that the other is still somewhere, not far. You go to the cemetery and speak to your beloved one, who is buried there. Hassan was trying something more forceful: to imagine that he, Hassan was somewhere, not far, and that the cow was here, in his body, instead of him! I know how it sounds, but it was Hassan's way to keep his universe.

Meanwhile life was going on in this village. A bunch of clay houses surrounding a small dirty pool. Old men chatting at some kind of a tea house, old women attending silently the daily events and waiting for the outcome, the village idiot tortured by kids for mere distraction, the nightly incursions of neighboring villagers: just a small closed universe around a small dirty pond.

Faced with the sudden madness of Hassan, the community comes to help, with great kindness and patience, to discover that help is sometimes useless and that kindness and patience have narrow limits.

A tragic ballade telling us that some things happen just because that's their way to happen and nobody could change anything.

Although Gaav (The Cow) was made in1969, its story of a tragedy in a small village could probably could have been set anytime in the last 5,000 years. At first, I thought the film might be a Fellini "Amacord" Iranian-style, a director's nostalgic look back at a simpler time and place, remembered from his childhood. But a better comparison might be "Sunset" (1927, Murnau): there is a timeless, eternal quality to the proceedings. These are not anyone's memories; instead, "Gaav" is a myth-like "universal" story.

Another point of reference is Sergei Paradjanov ("Color of Pomegranates", "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors"), who used the techniques of experimental cinema to bring new life to ancient myths and folkways. Unfortunately it has to be said that the director of "Gaav", Dariush Mehrjui didn't demonstrate as much cinematic skill or imagination as Paradjanov, at least in this film. There's glaring technical problems in the film, surely due to production and direction: the numerous night shots are often too dark to decipher; sound levels vary wildly from inaudible to deafening; awkward staging and editing makes it hard to understand the space of action; a subplot about a young couple's courtship seems a fruitless distraction; direction and staging of groups of actors seems artificial and awkward.

Yet the director gets strong performances from his main actors, and the film does become deep and affecting. The scenes involving Hassan and his friend Eslam form the core of the film, and are memorably weird and tragic.

Hassan has an all-consuming, absolutely pure love for his cow. It is the center of his world; even his wife seems to barely register to him. When the cow dies, Hassan cannot cope with the loss. His world crumbles, he retreats into madness. The plot revolves around the village's attempts to care for and accommodate Hassan's outsized love and grief. At this, it fails. As we see from the film's opening scene, the village can be a place of casual cruelty. In the end, the village's well-intentioned intercessions become the very cause of the final tragedy.

The most pivotal moment in the plot occurs when Hassan's friend Eslam and three others attempt to deal with the grief-stricken Hassan, who has become dangerously disconnected from reality. In his psychosis, the group appears to Hassan as maurading raiders from an enemy village. This is the true tragedy of the tale: love can exist in a form so extreme and powerful that the social order can do nothing except kill it. In this case, one's friends and neighbors may unwittingly turn out to be one's executioners.

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.

The title of this Iranian film made it really obvious what the story would involve, but not necessarily in the way you would expect, I found it listed in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, and I hoped it would be worth it. Basically in a remote and desolate village, middle-aged villager Masht Hassan (Ezzatolah Entezami) has a close relationship with his cow, the only one in the village, Hassan is married, but has no children. When Hassan goes away for a short time, the villagers look after his beloved and pregnant cow, but they find it dead. Knowing how much Hassan cherishes the cow, the villagers fear his reaction when he returns, so they decide to cover up the death and dispose of the corpse. When Hassan returns, they have covered up all evidence of the death, and they lie to him, telling him that the cow ran away. Hassan is unconvinced that his cow would ever run away, he is devastated and finds great difficulty in confronting by his loss, and the loss of livestock affects his social stature in the village. Hassan starts to spend more time in the barn, his grieving pushes him over the edge, and he has a nervous breakdown. Hassan goes insane and has developed boanthropy, a psychological disorder in which he believes himself to be a bovine, in other words, he believes he is the cow. Hassan has incorporated many cow-like mannerisms, including walking on his hands and knees, and eating hay, and the villagers cannot snap him out of it. In the end, his wife (Mahin Shahabi) and the villagers try a drastic method to cure his insanity, tie him up and drag him up a hill, it ends in tragedy when he runs away, and he falls to his death. Also starring Jamshid Mashayekhi as Abbas, Ali Nassirian as Islam, Khosrow Shojazadeh as Boy and Jafar Vali as Kadkhoda. I can see why this is considered an influential film, apparently it was banned as well, it is a very simple story, with themes of poverty, superstition and paranoia, it is both strange and fascinating to watch, a terrific drama. Very good!

We all try to hold on to this life. We all have different means, different purposes, but in fact we all live more or less the same. We don't just watch these stories, we live them. It is also easier to find parts of our own lives in such films. Perhaps because Hasan thinks he is a cow is related to his cow, perhaps because he knows that his real reputation comes from him. Regardless, it should not be forgotten that: You cannot descend from a tree that you climb with someone else's help. I think the most basic rule of this life. If man clings to one thing in order to exist, his bond with life will be a thread.

1953. The United States, the United Kingdom and their respective corporate cartels stage a coup and successfully overthrow the democratically elected government of Iran (specifically Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, who was set to nationalise local oil). Enter Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, your classic dictatorial, Western puppet leader. He's a full blown oil pimp. His people hate him, but the West love him. He rules as Shah of Iran until 1979, at which point he is overthrown by a local revolution led by the religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini. The rise of Khomeini is presented as a populist and spontaneous uprising, but Khomeini was backed by both the US and UK with the specific aim of ousting Pahlavi, a one time puppet who, like Saddam Hussein, had grown too big for his boots. Prior to his ousting, Pahlavi had begun to flex his muscles, refusing to sign away exclusive oil rights and beginning a programme to seek "oil-sales policy independence". The oil barons and superpowers don't like this. They stage another illegal coup. Not wanting left-wing democrats taking over from the Shah, the CIA began courting the Muslim Brotherhood and the Ayatollahs, all essentially religious fundamentalists. These clandestine operations echo CIA orchestrated coups against democratically elected officials in Guatemala, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba etc etc (see Alex Cox's "Walker"), most of whom were trying to institute land reforms, nationalise resources or help bridge the gaps between the peasantry and landowners. Can't have that.

Shortly prior to the toppling of Reza Pahlavi, a "soft war" was waged against Iran. The West refused to buy Iranian oil, began a campaign of economic pressure, planted covert agitators to fan religious discontent, put embargoes in place, staged oil and banking strikes and began cynically protesting the presence of "Iranian abuses of human rights". Meanwhile, Ayatollah Khomeini, who was being groomed to be the new leader of Iran, began appearing on news networks, which willingly gave voice to his propaganda. The message was clear: Anglo-American intelligence was committed to toppling their puppet. The Shah fled in January, and by February 1979 Khomeini had been flown into Iran to replace the Shah's government and proclaim the establishment of his own repressive theocratic state. Almost immediately, the US then began funding Iraq's decade long war against Iran.

Over the years, leaks and whistle-blowing would reveal the point of the Iranian fiasco: the radical Muslim Brotherhood movement behind Khomeini was endorsed specifically in order to promote the balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. In encouraging autonomous groups it was hoped that chaos would spread in what was termed an "Arc of Crisis", which would spill over into Muslim regions of the Soviet Union. Of course such arrangements never go quite to plan, but then, chaos partially was the plan.

Iranian art cinema was born in 1962 with "The House is Black", a documentary by Farough Farrokhzad which revolved around a leper colony. From here the Iranian New Wave's compassionate, neorealist and "humanist" qualities would spring. Seven years later Dariush Mehrjui's "The Cow" was released, regarded by many as the first "true" feature film of the Iranian New Wave. The film was funded by the Shah's government but was then quickly banned by the Ministry of Culture, presumably because it dared portray the impoverished conditions of rural Iran (ironically, after brutally oppressing his people, the errand-boy Shah was granted freedom and citizenship in the United States). In 1971 the film was smuggled to the Venice Film Festival, at which point it gained considerable recognition. Thanks largely to its odd and ambiguous plot - which plays well to Western audiences unfamiliar with Iranian culture, history and customs - the film raced across the world.

"The Cow's" plot? Dark, allegorical, mysterious and twisted, the story revolves around an Iranian villager, played by Ezzatolah Entezami, who owns the only cow in his village, a village perpetually terrified of thieves and invaders. After a brief absence, Ezzatolah returns home to find that his cow has died. This event plunges the man into madness, such that he eventually comes to believe that he is himself a cow.

The film plays like a cross between Kafka, an old folk-tale and the neorealist movement (neorealism is almost like a rite of passage which nations must at one point pass through). Of course those familiar with neorealist works may find little of interest here, but "The Cow" was nevertheless daring in its depiction of rural poverty in a society where the ruling class enjoyed all the fruits of economic growth. With its modernist score and bovine metamorphosis, the film also has an unsettling quality, particularly in the way it portrays a man whose identity, work, income, life and happiness are so inextricable from his beast of burden, his property, that its absence instigates an almost immediate and total meltdown. Our hero isn't just close to his one earthly possession, he seems to embody it before its absence. Elsewhere the film points fingers at scapegoaters, blind religious faith, jealousy and the dangers of suppressing truths. Incidentally, one of the chief chapters in the Koran is titled "The Cow", and like this film deals with "those who cover up reality" and the way "denial leads to disease". In that story, a cow's death is responsible for deciding who is guilty of a crime. Here, it's almost as though Ezzatolah becomes the cow to prevent crimes being forgotten. Unsurprisingly, the film was written by Gholam-Hossein Saedi, a staunch Marxist. The plot loosely (but not necessarily) echoes Marx's writings on "animal-like, estranged, objectified human labour".

Aesthetically, Mehrjui stresses flat planes, windows, squares, frames, screens, and frequently has his characters arranged like we the audience, looking in as Ezzatolah's grotesque transformation takes place. The film has a creepy, primitive quality; like a folk tale re-enacted by a gang of centenarians.

8.5/10 - Worth one viewing.

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 (also reviewed), 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.

A simple and beautiful work and literally life. Playing with the soul and spirit of an actor who sinks into his role in such a way that he really eats alfalfa, because he is no longer Mash Hassan, but the cow of Mash Hassan

The cow, which in its symbolic meaning, has the sex of fertility and fertility and similar words and has a positive charge in the collective unconscious of people, so positive that many people worship it directly and some people worship it indirectly, now it has become pregnant; A double fertility, a burden in a historical fertility, but this time, a vast drought and deadly destruction is ahead. A cow that is supposed to breed evil and madness and ultimately death. Now this mythical cow gives birth to an ominous and mourning; Sudden and unpredictable bereavement. And Mesh Hassan breathes this mourning directly and in its ominous air, he does not go through the stages of mourning one by one and experiences the first, second and third stages (shock - denial - emergence of emotional, psychological and physical symptoms) at the same time. . Mesh Hass feels the immediate blow that his pregnant lover took from him, and he begins to deny himself. It doesn't happen with the absence of a lover. And finally, this denial has no result other than creating a copy of the lover's memory; As it takes a form of role-playing, the self-denied role plays him. Apart from dealing with a risky subject and building a complex character, this film portrays a society that is thought-provoking. The superstitions and illusions of the enemy are one of the thought-provoking points of this film. Meshhasan's cow dies and various views are raised, among them: the work of the Baluris (eternal enemies of this village) is the most prominent. In the event that when the Bluuris came to Meshhasan's house to steal, they missed the absence of cows, which weakens the interpretation: "The work is the work of the Bluuris" and leaves nothing more than the illusion of the enemy. Shadows of illusion and superstition are everywhere in this village, women led by old Between them, with superstitious practices, they start praying, recite verses on the water, and sprinkle sips on the villagers to protect them from the evil of Satan and curses. They appeal to the hands whose power is beyond our world (the hands attached to the tip of the flag), the otherworldly hands that may be able to save this village from the hands of Satan (man's eternal enemy).

What was already, from the outset, a village life tale carrying some atmosphere and menace in the form of the three silhouetted figures of thieves from a neighbouring village, becomes a genuinely unsettling film when we begin to view events not through the protagonist but through those around him. This shift in point-of-view is done so matter-of-factly so as to invoke a vague anticipation of something more supernatural that is constantly at odds with the film's overall realism: suddenly denied internal access, we're never quite sure whether or not Hassan genuinely believes he is a cow, for instance, or whether the cow is even dead, even though we've seen the narrative events leading to this... At one point, there's a genuinely disturbing visual suggestion that Hassan has indeed begun to transmogrify into cattle, when the three neighbouring thieves come to steal the cow in the night, only to find it is its owner, lying in weird lighting. Events unfold against a vivid sense of community and what this livestock means.

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