Sarah reviewed for the Sunday Star Times until 2019. After a career change to secondary school teaching, she now she works in alternative education with our most disadvantaged rangatahi.
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Big cheese: Totone (Clément Faveau) makes a delivery. Image / Supplied
Big cheese: Totone (Clément Faveau) makes a delivery. Image / Supplied
Holy Cow, directed by Louise Courvoisier, is in cinemas now.
Totone is a pretty typical 18-year-old boy – smoking, carousing and trying to get laid. Kicked out of the ladies’ beds on misty mornings, the charming layabout is supposed to be helping his cheesemaker father deliver to the local fromageriesin the Jura region of eastern France.
Deceptively Tintin in looks, this Jacque-le-lad isn’t averse to cracking a bottle over the head of a romantic adversary. But other foolish teen choices cause worse results. When he’s landed with raising his tiny sister alone, Totone has to grow up fast.
Holy Cow is an astonishingly assured feature debut by young French-Swiss film-maker Louise Courvoisier.
Impressively, this is also the on-screen debut of real-life poultry farmer Clément Faveau as the youthful Totone. He is absolutely stunning – understated, composed and quietly magnetic in a story that echoes more seasoned European realists such as the Dardennes and Jacques Audiard’s older films.
Faveau is at the centre of almost every scene, and though his emotional range is muted by events in the narrative, he’s always captivating. But the drama is limited to snatching the rennet from the barrel in the precisely prescribed five-second window (we learn a lot about what it takes to produce a cheese worthy of being called Comté) and resolving relationship mal-entendus. The predictable plotting in the “against all odds” narrative is somewhat mitigated by the film’s success as a sweet character study in a pastoral setting.
As writer and director, Courvoisier devises several touching moments, from very tentative tugging at the veil of rural masculinity to awkward scenes of youthfully gauche sex. It’s not a jaw-dropping coming-out but it demonstrates this up-and-comer’s special talent in working with real people to create cinematic charm.
