Review of the “Holy Cow”: arrival at the mastery of age and cheese in France

The sunny opening of the first feature film by the director of the French director Louise Courvoisier, “Holy Cow”, which takes place in a cheese pocket in the Comté de la France region, is a living welcome. After the view of the head of a calf in the passenger seat of a compact car, we follow a strong man with a barrel through a packaged field field populated by people and livestock, before landing on Totone (Clément Faveau), a fascinated and flush teenager, just as well ready to climb on a table for a straw crowd.

Comté, a magnificent section of mountainous land, is (the festivities of the film apart) has Enclave far from rigorous workwhere the well -treated red and white cow's Montbéliard breed is the star employee. Meanwhile, height -headed siever off -heads with dairy producers looks like animals that need to be tamed. While we get to know the young chaotic protagonist of the film, portrayed with engagement by the first actor faveau, we expect him to get a hard life, because these stories generally offer. But as the old cheese manufacturing process shown throughout the film in fascinating previews of work done by hand – as if a The blank A short documentary had mixed with a Dardennes Brothers Drama – “Holy Cow” achieves his own special texture and flavor, the more her central character boils, milestones and cools.

Totone's favorite daily cycle, with friends Jean-Yves (Mathis Bernard) and Francis (Dimitry Baudry), is looking for a short-term pleasure: drinking, dancing, hitting girls, vomiting, vigoring, waking up, laughing, repeating. He knows the sweat and dedication of his father's world a little. But the reality of its importance for their livelihoods does not strike it as long as alcohol consumption at the end of the day leads to a fatal car accident and that Totone is left to take care of his younger sister, Claire (Luna Garret). Selling agricultural equipment is not enough; It is also difficult to keep a new job in dairy products from another family when the boss's sons are your enemies after working hours, quickly to fight at the slightest provocation.

But when Totone learns that the specialty of his region in his region can win a salary of 30,000 euros from a competition, it is stimulated, with the help of his friends, to rekindle family operations and make a county cheese that won the price. He invites other troubles, however, when he begins to connect with the new dairy farmer Marie-Lise, played by another newcomer, Maïwène Barthelemy. Totone loves him, that's for sure, but he also wants to get enough closer to steal high quality milk from his cows.

The fact that Marie-Lise hard, a worker and who works is the one who initiates this relationship with Totone makes her direct character a snapshot wonderfully defying the stereotypes of a woman who works in this world, as if the farmer's daughter in this secular scenario can now be the farmer.

Except that Courvoisier complicates it more by making Marie-Lise the sister of the brutal nales of Totone. But in one way or another, the scriptwriter -director, who grew up in agricultural villages like those of his film, makes the number of coincidences in terms of authenticity in the small town – of course, everyone is connected – and the dramatic issues that go with impulses and shortcuts. Its rhythms evoke both the energy and the calm buzzing of rural life, with an attractive wide framing of the wide screen of Elio Balezeaux by Elio Balezeaux capturing a range between tactile human intimacy and beautiful wide landscapes.

Perhaps above all, the “sacred cow” is trying to get in sight to be a study in accelerated adulthood, unless judgment or sentimentality. The French are as good in this kind of story as with their legendary and Courvoisier cheeses is no exception, revealing capable how, the lesson by lesson, Totone tempers its distracted nature and responds to its delayed sorrow with a sense of goal and the responsibility that begins to grow. Commitment, timing and patience make a deliciously mature bite.