If there’s one place in the world you’d want to make your debut, it’s France. Louise Courvoisier’s Holy Cow opens with a string of company idents that would befit a filmmaker well into a successful career — Canal+, Ciné+, CNC, France 3 Cinéma, France Télévisions, among others — yet this is only Courvoisier’s first feature, after two short films made pre-Covid. It’s a display of financial and creative support rarely afforded to first-time directors outside of France (and barely conceivable in the U.S.), and perhaps all the more remarkable for the ostensible mundanity of Holy Cow’s conceit — a stylistically modest coming-of-age story about a teenage boy who seeks to improve his fortunes by entering a cheese-making contest following the death of his father. But the support is earned — this is a fine, perceptive film with a modesty that belies its emotional depth and Courvoisier’s technical acuity.
Totone (Clément Faveau) is a young man living with his little sister and drunk father in the French countryside, spending his days drinking, partying, and hanging out with his friends. When his father dies in a car accident, he’s forced to find work to support himself and his sister, and turns to his father’s award-winning, Comté-producing employers for a job. Here, he devises a scheme to boost his earnings: stealing milk to enter the same Comté competition as his employers, a task that will plainly demand a lot of patience, determination, and grit from this carefree, volatile youngster.
It’s a quintessentially neo-realist concept — ragtag youths, petty crime, a mix of comedy, tragedy, and a touch of suspenseful thrill, and Courvoisier’s unobtrusive, character-focused style. If the director doesn’t attempt to contribute anything particularly fresh to such a concept, she succeeds in capturing one’s attention nonetheless, through the sensitivity with which she crafts her nuanced portrait of her characters’ lives. Nothing in Holy Cow feels forced or overly emphasized — details such as Totone’s sister wearing her pajamas to school, or his inability to achieve an erection with two different women, are allowed to impart meaning simply through being stated. And yet, there’s purpose behind even small details such as these, and consequence to events, lines or gestures that might initially appear throwaway. In maintaining an observational distance at certain moments, Courvoisier staves off the potential for melodrama or contrivance; in her acute emotional insight, however, she compensates for the distance. There’s a wholeness to her vision — it’s complex yet accessible, equally informed by real life and capable of translating it into a satisfactory dramatic form.
Such an outwardly simple depiction of simple lives requires some complexity in its construction — the reality is that no one’s life is ever actually simple, and Holy Cow is duly shot through with the knotty intricacies of one such life. Totone’s situation is fraught with both the strain of poverty and the tension of the deception he engages in to execute his scheme. Courvoisier and co-writer Théo Abadie maintain one eye on his hardships as they indulge his hopes, and vice versa. In one particularly anxious moment, he’s forced to divulge a painful secret to his girlfriend, cattle farmer Marie-Lise (Maïwene Barthelemy), while assisting her with the difficult birth of a calf. Throughout the film, Totone’s actions and emotions are informed by the desperation of his situation; his fortunes, his relationships, his prospects are forged out of necessity. Penniless and parent-less, it isn’t that Totone can’t escape these hardships — though the film’s commitment to narrative realism does ensure that he must face numerous obstacles — but rather that every effort he must make to do so will be driven by them.
In a similar manner, the limitations of the film’s design may be overcome, but they remain fundamentally present. Its humility and familiarity prevent it from achieving a level of artistic excellence of which one senses Courvoisier is capable — there’s considerable care and thought put into this film’s characters, their moods and motivations, and she’s exceptionally good with her performers, drawing richly shaded work from a cast wholly comprised of first-time actors, especially Faveau in the lead. Their vibrant yet naturalistic performances are emblematic of Holy Cow as a whole, formed as they are from a concept in a similar vein. It may appear unremarkable on paper, and ultimately it’s far from the most groundbreaking film, but there’s much to appreciate here, and much to suggest a promising filmmaking career ahead for Louise Courvoisier.
DIRECTOR: Louise Courvoisier; CAST: Clément Faveau, Luna Garret, Mathis Bertrand, Dimitry Baudry; DISTRIBUTOR: Zeitgeist Films; IN THEATERS: March 28; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 30 min.
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