A woman and her dog walk along a riverbank, the dog exploring, then pawing at the earth. The woman kneels, sees the cranium of a human skull and pushes soil away with her hands. She looks at birds chattering in a nearby tree. We cut to other hands, in tattered fingerless gloves, pulling at mushrooms, then righting an overturned lizard which inches away. We hear a sound, see the face of a man in a brimmed hat who is unnerved and flees. We are 200 years back in time, in Oregon, the US ‘beaver state’, when trappers almost killed off the animal for its fur to make top hats. Then we see a cow, which we learn is the first in the territory, slowly amble onto land from a flat-bottomed wooden float.
Reichardt’s seventh feature, and her fifth set in Oregon, is naturalistic, physically immersive and rawly conveys the social hierarchy of the early years of European incursion. It focuses on the friendship between an English baker and a well-travelled Chinese man at a rough-and-tumble fur-trading post. King-Lu has plenty of ideas, Cookie is hard-working and would like to run a hotel someplace, sometime – but they lack capital. Until, that is, they spot the cow, property of the top-hatted head of the trading-post.
