Original Title: Vingt dieux
Color / French Language / English Subtitles / MPA rating: Not rated / Runtime: 92 min
A celebration of young love and artisanal cheese-making, this micro-budget French drama became a £5 million box office smash on home soil, where it’s outperformed Oscar-winning heavyweights such as Anora, The Substance and The Brutalist. Only in France, you might shrug. Yet Holy Cow could charm anyone, even the most die-hard cheese-hater.
The setting is a sunlit, hardscrabble farming community in the Jura mountains. Here 18-year-old Totone (Clément Favreau) is a freckle-faced scamp whose carefree days of beer, girls, fights, fags and more beer hit a wall when his father dies, leaving him penniless and responsible for his seven-year-old sister (Luna Garret). Soon, Totone comes up with an unusual solution. Despite a total lack of expertise, he will enter a comté-making competition and win the €30,000 prize.
You can predict the entire movie already, right? The comedy cow moments, the cutesy sibling bonding, the nail-biting climax at the snooty cheese championships … However, Holy Cow delights by swerving most of those generic story beats while still serving up a feelgood ending that fully satisfies.
The secret ingredient here is authenticity. The director Louise Courvoisier was herself raised on a farm in the Jura region and has realised her assured, multi-award-winning debut with a largely non-professional cast. Favreau, her lead, is a former poultry farmer, whom she had to beg to perform a role that has since won him the Lumière award for most promising actor.
Immersed in rural, working-class culture, the action is vérité and honest without being bleak. Courvoisier shoots in a way that’s unfiltered — literally, given her use of natural light. You can practically feel that cool misty air, that hot sun on your skin.
Her vivid film is so alive you may believe you could even reach out and touch it — or eat it. Yet this isn’t glossy holiday porn or foodie porn any more than it is misery porn. Those mountain vistas are ravishing; they are also wonderfully wild.
A heartwarming coming-of-age story about a raw boy slowly ripening to manhood, this impressively mature debut is earthy, compassionate and never too cheesy.
Review by Larushka Ivan-Zadeh, for The Times of London
