COW (DOU NIU)
China, 2009, 105 minutes, Colour.
Huang Bo, Yan Ni.
Directed by Guan Hu.
The Cow is yet another film made by the Chinese about the Japanese invasion of the 1930s. The focus is on Huang Bo who plays a simpleton in a village. The villagers have been massacred but the man has survived, along with a cow. He survives the Japanese occupation. He eventually hides in the hills – for years until he is found by the locals after Mao’s revolution. However, he is more at home alone with the cow in the hills.
Interestingly filmed, interestingly structured with flashbacks, the film is another angle on the effect of the Japanese and their presence in China at the crucial time of the 1930s. This was a theme of such films as John Rabe, City of Life and Death, Forever Enthralled.
1. The legend of the cow? The facts? The Chinese tone of the legend? World War Two? Universal appeal?
2. The re-creation of the war, the Japanese invasion, their cruelty, massacres, the Resistance? Chinese memories of this period?
3. The role of the Red Army, the confrontation with the Japanese, during the war, the aftermath? After 1949?
4. The locations, the village (reconstructed for the film)? The buildings, bombed, the contrast with the countryside, the mountains and the snow? The musical score? The songs?
5. The different times in the structure of the film: the present, with Niu? His waking, surviving, with his own cow, the shock, coming across the mass grave, search for anybody surviving? The discovery of the cow – and its ominous bursting out of the brick building? The milk? The arrival of the refugees, the exploitation of the milk, attacking Niu, wanting to kill the cow for food? The Japanese arrival, Niu eluding them, eventually taken, at the point of execution, the arrival of the Resistance, saved? His wandering with the cow over the years? The cow and the 8th Army, the certificate, allowing him ownership?
6. Niu as a character, simple, his love for Jiu, wanting to marry her, the responsibility of looking after the cow, her death, taking her bangle from the grave?
7. The flashbacks, life in the village, the leader, the issue of the cow, the donation from Holland, responsibility, the red bean amongst the others, Jiu finding it, giving it to Niu? Jiu and her outspokenness, newcomer to the village, her care for Niu, the Japanese, her death?
8. Jiu as a character, the outsider, loud, a woman in this village, her interactions with the men, the other women, the cow?
9. The cow, large, disguised during the war? The foreign gift? The milk, the blood? The cow’s survival?
10. The final images of the newsreel, Holland and its gift of the cow?
11. A Chinese morale-boosting fable?
