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The Guardian
12-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Holy Cow review – unlikely French teen cheesemaker drama with a big heart
Here's something to tempt the appetites of fans of French cinema and artisan cheeses alike: Holy Cow, the first feature fim from French director Louise Courvoisier, has been a breakout success domestically (it won a prize at Cannes and a couple of Césars, and went on to win over French audiences in their droves). On paper, this tale of a rural teenage delinquent who dreams of glory in the annual comté cheesemaking competition sounds like any number of generic feelgood underdog tales. But there's a knack to making great rural cinema, which boils down to capturing the grit and spit and personality of the place rather than some sun-dappled romantic projection of a simpler life. It helps immeasurably that Courvoisier grew up in the same remote Jura farming community in eastern France where the film is set. It shows in every rough-edged, beer-drenched frame – this is earthy, sweaty, unvarnished film-making with dirt under its nails – and in particular it benefits the casting and direction of the phenomenal, largely nonprofessional actors. Courvoisier's storytelling approach is sensitive but resolutely unsentimental, despite the tragedy that underpins this coming-of-age story. Teenage deadbeat Totone (Clément Faveau) spends his summer drinking, fighting, chasing girls and tooling around on battered dirt bikes. Then his alcoholic, widowed father dies, leaving Totone responsible for a failing farm and his seven-year-old sister. Totone latches on to the cheese competition, with its generous prize money, as a quick-fix solution to his predicament. But to make cheese, he decides to steal milk from young farmer Marie-Lise (Maïwene Barthelemy). Ultimately, the comté is beside the point: the nourishment in this terrific, big-hearted drama comes from Courvoisier's satisfyingly full-blooded characters. In UK and Irish cinemas
The Guardian
09-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Holy Cow review – warmhearted story of smalltown teen turned champion cheesemaker
It doesn't get more French than a drama about cheese. Holy Cow is the feature debut from director (and part-time farmer) Louise Courvoisier; it's a social-realist drama that is the opposite of grim and miserable in its warm and often funny telling of a coming-of-age story about a teenager from a struggling family of comté-makers in the remote region of Jura. Courvoisier warms things up nicely with her idealism and optimism, and she gets brilliant performances from her non-professional cast, cows included. The opening scene features a calf sitting in the driver's seat of a car staring out of the window. Newcomer Clément Faveau (a poultry farmer in real-life) plays 18-year-old Totone, first shown at a country fair so drunk that he jumps on a table and strips naked. Totone lives with his dad, a cheesemaker who drinks heavily, and his wise seven-year-old sister; no one ever mentions a mum. Totone gets small-town kicks with his mates, riding around on mopeds getting drunk, until something awful happens. Left alone to look after his sister, Totone comes up with a daft get-rich-quick scheme to make €30,000 in a comté competition. How hard can it be to knock out a prize-winning wheel? Faveau gives an amazingly subtle performance; Totone doesn't say much but his fragility and complexity are all there, humour too in the little shrug of a shoulder. Also terrific is Maïwene Barthelemy, as a teenage dairy farmer Totone falls in love with – and steals from. In what might be the most tender line of the film, she tells Totone, not unkindly: 'Stop snivelling and pull your finger out.' Holy Cow is sentimental in the best of ways, with its warmth and hope in human nature. After watching the intensive labour of the cheese-making scenes you may also complain less about handing over a fiver for a little chunk of comté. Holy Cow shows at UK and Irish cinemas from 11 April.
Yahoo
05-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
After a few detours, French boys rise to the occasion of cheese-making in 'Holy Cow'
The sunlit opening of French writer-director Louise Courvoisier's punchy, sweet coming-of-age debut feature, 'Holy Cow,' set in a cheese-making pocket of France's Comté region, is a lively welcome. After the head-scratching sight of a calf in the passenger seat of a compact car, we follow a burly man with a keg through a packed fairgrounds populated by people and livestock, before landing on Totone (Clément Faveau), a blitzed, flush-faced teenage boy all too willing to climb on a table and strip for a taunting crowd. Comté, a gorgeous, mountainous stretch of land, is (the film's revelry aside) a remote enclave of exacting work, where the well-treated red-and-white Montbéliarde breed of cow is the star employee. Meanwhile, the dairy farmers' hot-headed, party-hearty offspring seem like the animals in need of taming. As we get to know the movie's wiry, chaotic young protagonist, engagingly portrayed by first-time actor Faveau, we expect he'll get a life education the hard way, as these stories usually offer up. But like the ancient cheese-making process shown throughout the film in fascinating glimpses of handmade toil — as if a Les Blank short documentary had mixed with a Dardennes brothers drama — 'Holy Cow' achieves its own special texture and flavor the more its central character boils, curdles and cools. Totone's preferred daily cycle, with buddies Jean-Yves (Mathis Bernard) and Francis (Dimitry Baudry) in tow, is short-term pleasure-seeking: drinking, dancing, hitting on girls, puking, passing out, waking up, laughing about it, repeating. He knows a bit about the sweat and dedication of his father's world. But the reality of its importance to their livelihood doesn't hit him until dad's own end-of-day drinking results in a fatal car accident and Totone is left to look after his younger sister, Claire (Luna Garret). Selling off farm equipment isn't enough; it's also difficult to keep a new job at another family's dairy when the boss' sons are your after-hours enemies, quick to fight at the slightest provocation. Read more: The 27 best movie theaters in Los Angeles But when Totone learns that his region's Gruyère-like specialty can land a 30,000-euro payday from a contest, he's spurred, with his friends' help, to revive his family's operation and make a prizewinning Comté cheese. He invites further trouble, though, when he starts hooking up with newbie dairy farmer Marie-Lise, played by another well-cast newcomer, Maïwène Barthelemy. Totone likes her, for sure, but he also wants to get close enough to steal her cows' high-quality milk. That the tough, hardworking and no-nonsense Marie-Lise is the one who initiates this relationship with Totone makes her forthright character a wonderfully stereotype-defying snapshot of a woman laboring in this world, as if the farmer's daughter in that age-old scenario can now just be the farmer. Except Courvoisier complicates it further by making Marie-Lise the sister of Totone's brutish nemeses. But somehow, the writer-director, who grew up in agriculture villages like the ones in her film, makes that coincidence count in terms of small-town authenticity — of course, everyone's connected — and the dramatic stakes that go with impulses and shortcuts. Her rhythms evoke both the energy and quiet hum of rural life, with cinematographer Elio Balézeaux's attractive widescreen framing capturing a range between tactile human intimacy and beautiful wide landscapes. Perhaps most crucially, 'Holy Cow' keeps its sights set on being a study in fast-tracked adulthood, minus judgment or sentimentality. The French are as good at this kind of story as they are with their legendary cheeses and Courvoisier is no exception, capably revealing how, lesson by lesson, Totone tempers his distractable nature and answers his delayed grief with a sense of purpose and responsibility that starts to look like growing up. Commitment, timing and patience make for a delightfully mature bite. Sign up for Indie Focus, a weekly newsletter about movies and what's going on in the wild world of cinema. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
After a few detours, French boys rise to the occasion of cheese-making in ‘Holy Cow'
The sunlit opening of French writer-director Louise Courvoisier's punchy, sweet coming-of-age debut feature, 'Holy Cow,' set in a cheese-making pocket of France's Comté region, is a lively welcome. After the head-scratching sight of a calf in the passenger seat of a compact car, we follow a burly man with a keg through a packed fairgrounds populated by people and livestock, before landing on Totone (Clément Faveau), a blitzed, flush-faced teenage boy all too willing to climb on a table and strip for a taunting crowd. Comté, a gorgeous, mountainous stretch of land, is (the film's revelry aside) a remote enclave of exacting work, where the well-treated red-and-white Montbéliarde breed of cow is the star employee. Meanwhile, the dairy farmers' hot-headed, party-hearty offspring seem like the animals in need of taming. As we get to know the movie's wiry, chaotic young protagonist, engagingly portrayed by first-time actor Faveau, we expect he'll get a life education the hard way, as these stories usually offer up. But like the ancient cheese-making process shown throughout the film in fascinating glimpses of handmade toil — as if a Les Blank short documentary had mixed with a Dardennes brothers drama — 'Holy Cow' achieves its own special texture and flavor the more its central character boils, curdles and cools. Totone's preferred daily cycle, with buddies Jean-Yves (Mathis Bernard) and Francis (Dimitry Baudry) in tow, is short-term pleasure-seeking: drinking, dancing, hitting on girls, puking, passing out, waking up, laughing about it, repeating. He knows a bit about the sweat and dedication of his father's world. But the reality of its importance to their livelihood doesn't hit him until dad's own end-of-day drinking results in a fatal car accident and Totone is left to look after his younger sister, Claire (Luna Garret). Selling off farm equipment isn't enough; it's also difficult to keep a new job at another family's dairy when the boss' sons are your after-hours enemies, quick to fight at the slightest provocation. But when Totone learns that his region's Gruyère-like specialty can land a 30,000-euro payday from a contest, he's spurred, with his friends' help, to revive his family's operation and make a prizewinning Comté cheese. He invites further trouble, though, when he starts hooking up with newbie dairy farmer Marie-Lise, played by another well-cast newcomer, Maïwène Barthelemy. Totone likes her, for sure, but he also wants to get close enough to steal her cows' high-quality milk. That the tough, hardworking and no-nonsense Marie-Lise is the one who initiates this relationship with Totone makes her forthright character a wonderfully stereotype-defying snapshot of a woman laboring in this world, as if the farmer's daughter in that age-old scenario can now just be the farmer. Except Courvoisier complicates it further by making Marie-Lise the sister of Totone's brutish nemeses. But somehow, the writer-director, who grew up in agriculture villages like the ones in her film, makes that coincidence count in terms of small-town authenticity — of course, everyone's connected — and the dramatic stakes that go with impulses and shortcuts. Her rhythms evoke both the energy and quiet hum of rural life, with cinematographer Elio Balézeaux's attractive widescreen framing capturing a range between tactile human intimacy and beautiful wide landscapes. Perhaps most crucially, 'Holy Cow' keeps its sights set on being a study in fast-tracked adulthood, minus judgment or sentimentality. The French are as good at this kind of story as they are with their legendary cheeses and Courvoisier is no exception, capably revealing how, lesson by lesson, Totone tempers his distractable nature and answers his delayed grief with a sense of purpose and responsibility that starts to look like growing up. Commitment, timing and patience make for a delightfully mature bite.
New York Times
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Holy Cow' Review: How to Become a Big Cheese
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.
