A Surprising Lack of Pretension Saves an Oddly Named Film

If the title of Francisca Alegría’s debut feature, “The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future,” isn’t enough to clue in a casual moviegoer as to its heady nature, then consider this: It’s a zombie movie masquerading as a generational family drama that serves as a homily on trans acceptance as well as being a cautionary tale about environmental degradation. Did I mention that it’s also an exegesis on the plight of independent farmers? Oh, and it’s a biker flick. All of which is bracketed by a Greek chorus made up of cows. Yes, cows.Sounds awful, right? Ms. Algeria’s arthouse fantasy is, to put it mildly, willful. It would have to be to cover all of those political correctness bullet points. Certainly, the picture betrays a youthful overconfidence in the belief that eccentricity can and should be its own reward. Still, “The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future” manages to catapult over its own affectations through a surprising lack of pretension, a tone that navigates deftly between romance and realism, and a raft of delicately gauged performances. It’s to Ms. Alegría’s credit that she had the consummate good sense to hire Inti Briones as director of photography. The picture looks great.Begin at the beginning: The camera alights on a river in southern Chile. An abundance of dead fish are stranded on the shoreline. Bugs crawl; ants march. The water begins to bubble. A woman ascends from water’s depths — an Ophelia in biker gear. After collapsing on the river bank, she stands erect and alights into the surrounding forest. Meet Magdalena (Mia Maestro), a youngish woman of compact stature and statuesque mien who’s been dead for quite some time. The scene shifts from the backwoods to the city, wherein we are introduced to Cecilia (a brooding Leonor Varela), a single mother of a young girl and an adolescent boy whose identity is in crisis — well, at least it’s a crisis to mother. Cecilia is a 40-something doctor who receives a phone call from her brother with the news that their father has been hospitalized. The doctors on call are doing tests to determine why it is, exactly, that Enrique (Alfredo Castro) believes he’s recently encountered his dead wife.Cecilia packs up the kids — that is, after convincing Tomás (Enzo Ferrada) to take it easy on the make-up, the halter tops, and other feminine accoutrement — and travels to the family’s dairy farm. Father is frazzled but no worse for wear in having briefly encountered the dearly or, perhaps, not-so-dearly departed Magdalena. Big brother Bernardo (Marcial Tagle) is a sad sack who is well aware he isn’t dad’s favorite. That would be Cecilia, who would rather be anywhere than stuck in the boonies.You can’t blame her, really. I mean, what is she to make of Cow No. 2222, a peculiarly sentient animal she comes across while walking through the forest during the deepest and darkest of nights? Pile that on top of dad’s delusions, Tomás’s gender-bending, the farm’s financial woes, and the reappearance of Magdalena — a mother she never really knew and whom she deeply resents — and you have more balls than any reasonable mother should be expected to juggle.All of which doesn’t begin to give a full flavor of Ms. Alegría’s film. Although the accompanying press materials reiterate hot-button issues that seem to be part-and-parcel of a generation’s mindset — Ms. Alegría’s is not yet 40 — “The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future” is blessedly light on overt moralizing. It is also, alas, too pat in its generalities about family, especially as we reach the film’s denouement. Still, here is a curiosity with enough going for it to make one eager to see what Ms. Alegría puts her hand to next.

A Surprising Lack of Pretension Saves an Oddly Named Film

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