People Find Love in the Strangest Places

It is always said that a dog is a man’s best friends, but in the case of “The Cow” created by Dariush Mehrjui and Ghoalamhossein Saedi, a cow took the dogs places.  Starting from the very beginning I knew the story revolved around a close relationship with a man and his cow – close enough to become one. The intro used abstract shadows that mimicked a mirage to depict a man and his cow. As the shapes crossed one another, there was a specific point in time that the man and cow united into one body (almost like the headless horseman, but obviously with a head).

                As the story continued, it was clear that the connection between Hassan and his cow was a peculiar one. Hassan looked at her with more affection and passion than he gave his own wife. He was infatuated with the cow and revolved his life around her. Hassan would watch the cow eat from a distance and smile just like a husband would watch a wife. He became engrossed in her and tried to feed the cow from his own mouth. This type of behavior would usually be diagnosed as a psychological issue. After reading the article written by Dabashi, much of the story made sense.

                With a doctorate in psychiatry and a childhood filled with a dramatic imagination, the idea of a man acting like a cow in memory of its death starts to seem not that out of the ordinary. Saedi has quite the imagination says Dabashi in his article Dariush Mehrjui The Cow which lead him to creating “magical realms” based on “literary projection of severe poverty narrated in between psychotic consequences of religious or communal rituals”. This principal concept pieced together why the Hassan and the rest of the town created the cow with such praise. It was as if the cow was a savior. For example, when the cow passed away everyone was saying, “No!”, and rushed to the center of town to see the rest of the villagers. As a “psychotic” consequence for the cow’s death, Hassan slowly began to act more and more like the cow as if he were diseased (which is common for Iranian films to correlate with poverty such as in the film).

All in all, I enjoyed the film and felt in a bizarre way it showed that people find love and happiness in many different ways. Some find it in a man or women, perhaps a sport, or even a cow – but in the end, love never dies.