The low-key charms of the coming-of-age story “Holy Cow” emerge gradually but steadily. Set amid the rolling slopes of the Jura, a mountainous region in eastern France, the movie traces a teenager’s progression from carefree, at times careless youth to adulthood after a life-altering tragedy. That might lead to a rainstorm of tears elsewhere, but this is a world of dry-eyed pragmatism. And here everything does ripen, an eventuality that this movie charts with wry humor, appreciable regional sensitivity and many wheels of artisanal cheese.
The writer-director Louise Courvoisier fills in the contemporary story with light, brisk economy. Shifting between the specific and the general, she quickly lays out the narrative coordinates, introducing a people and a place that are at once geographically isolated and interdependent. The first time you see the 18-year-old Totone (Clément Faveau) he’s at a county fair — where people are milling about with cows — soused and demanding beer. One moment, he is standing on a table and being goaded to take it all off by the raucous crowd; in the next, a cigarette is dangling from his mouth and his briefs are puddled around his ankles.
Totone’s striptease turns out to be a prelude for his character’s ensuing, more freighted adventures. With quick-sketch portraits, Courvoisier fills in Totone’s life, including his testy relationship with his father, a cheesemaker who’s soon out of the picture. Abruptly unencumbered by parents (his mother is missing-in-action), Totone becomes the sole caretaker for his sober-eyed 7-year-old sister, Claire (Luna Garret). He also finds himself without much of a safety net. With only some friends to help — unlike in many French films, no government functionaries come to the rescue — he fends for him and his sister largely on his own. He sells most of his father’s equipment and takes a job with another cheesemaker.
Courvoisier grew up in the Jura, where her parents are farmers. She has an insider’s unforced ease with this world, which she economically opens up with piquant details, lived-in spaces, careworn faces and just enough shots of the landscapes to convey both its beauty and its isolation. It’s never clear if Totone truly sees this loveliness and how pretty the cows look on the misty fields. Like all the performers in the movie, Faveau is an nonprofessional actor, and while he has a bright, expressive affect, Totone is one of those characters whose inner life is largely expressed externally through his grins and grimaces, his gestures and actions.
Even so, from the movie’s amusing opening image of a calf inexplicably standing inside a small, otherwise empty car, Courvoisier underscores the intimacy between the region’s people and their world. These connections come more into play once Totone begins working at the dairy, a multigenerational family enterprise that produces prizewinning Comté. There, the story begins gathering momentum as he finds tension and trouble, along with a romance with the owner’s daughter, Marie-Lise (Maïwène Barthelemy), who tends the cows. Also crucially, Totone discovers that the awards the dairy has won come with hefty cash payouts so he does what you’ve expected him to do from the start: He tries to produce his own cheese.
Totone’s new venture has its ups and downs; he blunders early and sometimes comically. Yet one of the virtues of Courvoisier’s storytelling is that while Totone’s nascent cheese making parallels his growth, her attention to his labor and the production process — to the temperature of the boiling milk and how the curds are separated from the whey — keeps the story grounded. Totone watches videos, observes veteran cheese makers, scrubs out his father’s one remaining copper vat and discovers that spring flowers affect the taste of cheese. He also learns how to successfully deliver a breech calf: calmly and with rope tied around its legs, a birth that drolly echoes when he stood naked with his pants around his ankles.
If “Holy Cow” were a different, more sentimental movie, all this would land far too squarely on the nose. But Courvoisier is more interested in human complexity than in generically packaged uplift, which makes the fact that this is her feature directing debut all the more impressive. (It won a special “youth prize” at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.) So as Totone continues to struggle to make cheese, he keeps on struggling at life, too. He stirs the pot, learns how to make love, cares for a calf, leans on his pals (Mathis Bernard and Dimitry Baudry). In time, he also learns how to dip his hands and forearms into the scaldingly hot milk without burning himself, one of those lessons that works as well in life as it does in this modest, gentle movie.
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