The full comté: quest to make a semi-hard cheese is French cinema's breakout hit of the year

The Guardian

01-04-2025

Louise Courvoisier grew up the daughter of farmers in France's eastern Jura region and, by the time she was 15, was desperate to leave this backwater. So she chose a boarding school 100km away in Besançon that happened to offer a cinema course. 'I really needed to get out, for sure,' says the director, now 31. 'But after my studies I needed to come back, and I had a new point of view. Leaving let me look at things differently and see what others don't see. And I think that, without getting that distance on the region, I couldn't have made this film.'
The film in question is Holy Cow, a rough-edged, sharp-tongued but good-hearted tale about one teenager's quest to make a prize-winning wheel of comté cheese, a Jura speciality. The story appears to be comparable to the likes of The Full Monty or Brassed Off – British underdog comedies that Courvoisier admires for their social conscience.
But actually it is rawer and more immediate. It is anchored in the predicament of its protagonist, Totone, who is left to provide for his younger sister after their alcoholic father kills himself driving – and the pent-up isolation and frustration of the French countryside presses in. Next to Marcel Pagnol nostalgia, the film is a heady huff of diesel oil; its French title, Vingt Dieux, is a local exclamation literally meaning '20 gods!'
It was always Courvoisier's goal to cow-tip the stereotypes visible among what she dismisses as the 'annual quota of French rural films'. But bringing a crew into the region to film there was risky. 'It was very delicate because people from the Jura are kind of wild, because it's such a remote region,' she says in a Zoom call, her backdrop the stone wall of the farmhouse she shares with her parents and siblings. 'They're never in contact with people from elsewhere, so there's this distrust of anything from outside.'
Added to that was Holy Cow's unfiltered approach: it loiters in the sozzled village fetes and demolition derbies that punctuate rural boredom, and focuses on the ne'er-do-wells and marginalised. 'I think most people in the region would have preferred if my main character was someone ambitious who takes over a farm and gives a flamboyant image of the countryside,' says Courvoisier. 'But instead I decided to talk about those people everyone wants to hide.' In doing so, she joins a recent cadre of French films with a more abrasive and complex take on the countryside, such as those of Alain Guiraudie, and 2023's Super-Bourrés (Super Drunk) and Chiens de la Casse (Junkyard Dog).
Courvoisier got the Jurassiens onside by involving them as much as possible in the production, most significantly by casting local non-professionals. Lead actor Clément Faveau, whose performance is fantastically irate and determined, is a poultry farm worker in real life. After he initially refused the role, she worked on him until he accepted. 'That mixture of violence and fragility that was written on his face, in his eyes, was exactly what I was looking for,' she says. 'I think his personality isn't always easy for him or those around him to handle because he's really highly strung.'
Courvoisier's attachment to the area isn't just academic. Like the rest of her family, she divides her time between artistic activities and working on the farm, which produces cereals only using animal labour. With a thick mop of wavy black hair, and wearing a Princeton T-shirt, she has the fresh-faced complexion of someone who doesn't solely spend their time in editing suites. In mid-March when we talk, the serious labour hasn't yet begun – but she's trying to get rid of nesting bees in the walls. 'You're detaching yourself completely from reality when you make cinema,' she says. 'So it helps me to have another activity that's satisfying and concrete.'
Furthering the artisanal feel, Courvoisier's family – her 'pack', as she calls them – were also closely involved with the film. Her parents, who were touring baroque musicians before they were farmers, and one of her brothers composed the score; her other brother and sister did the set design. Despite the artistic background, Courvoisier didn't have a cinephile upbringing. With the nearest cinema 20km away, the family usually spent DVD evenings in front of commercial Hollywood fodder such as Pirates of the Caribbean and Jaws.
Strangely for a small independent film, blockbusters were what Courvoisier and her cinematographer on Holy Cow often watched for inspiration. Fast and Furious films were a point of reference for the demolition derby scenes. And as a way of getting round the difficulty of filming beds interestingly, she used what she calls the 'Magic Mike shot': a painterly juxtaposition of two lovers' faces. 'My influences aren't just cinephile or intellectual, but also mainstream,' Courvoisier says. 'It's interesting to work out how certain films attract such large audiences. Even if we're making something very different, I like to try and have that generosity.'
By Jura standards, Holy Cow hit the big time: far surpassing box office expectations, it also earned two César awards, including best debut for Courvoisier. She thinks the film has created an excitement and a sense of pride in seeing the region's reality up on screen. And she hopes that, by pulling in both urban and rural audiences, it may get the metropolitan networks who control cinema more interested in provincial film-makers and their outlook. In any case, she is staying put. 'For now, I have no desire to go elsewhere. I need a mixture of fantasy and real life that I wouldn't necessarily find outside of the Jura's borders. It's my arena of cinema.'
Holy Cow is in US cinemas now and released in UK cinemas on 11 April