Holy Cow (Vingt Dieux), (15) |Close-Up Film Review

his is the story of 18 year old Totone, (Clément Faveau), living in the Jura agricultural region of southern France, who has to take care of his 7 year old sister after their father dies.  

As the son of a cheesemaker, Totone hopes to win a large cash prize in a competition for the best Comté cheese in the region for which the area is famous.

So a sweet pastoral idyll perhaps?   No way.  The title of the film in French is Vingt dieux! (Twenty gods!), the French equivalent of “Bloody hell!” – though in an area where milk and cheese are the lifeblood and people swear a lot, “Holy Cow” as an oath does the business rather well.  

This is the real French countryside, which may itself be pretty but the French farming types who live and work there are a rough, tough crowd, who drink heavily, fight ferociously and go in for a bit of seriously dangerous stock car racing.   Debut feature director Courvoisier knows all this first hand.  This is where she was born and raised. 

When we first meet Totone he’s doing a drunken strip tease at a rowdy, open air gathering.  So drunk is he that he’s unable to perform, when he gets his squeeze of the night into the sack. It’s shortly after that his father is killed.  Not a noble death.  He was trying to drive home, when he too was smashed out of his skull.

To support himself and his little sister Totone is forced to get a job – in the cheese-making business of course.   But his undisciplined behaviour soon gets him the sack.  He then discovers there is a competition for best Comté cheese of the year with a very generous money prize and in what seems like a fit of optimism over experience, decides that is the way out of his hard up state.

However to make cheese, you need milk – the real rich, natural local milk, not the pasteurised stuff.  So Totone,befriends and seduces young Marie-Lise (Maïwene Barthelemy),a local girl who’s recently inherited her farm and he then steals from her the milk with which he hopes to make his prize winning cheese.  Marie-Lise however is made of canny peasant stock, as are her brothers, so Totone is courting disaster.  Along with the fact that he’s actually getting rather fond of Marie-Lise, when he helps her with the difficult birth of a reluctant calf – one of the many scenes that demonstrate dairy farming and cheese making ain’t for cissies. 

The largely non professional cast are all very good.  It’s  tough, sexy, unsentimental and wholly convincing, while Favreau in his first ever film role keeps us on side with Totone, even though he is a rascal. 

French audiences have loved the film.   It’s won several prizes in France, including the Un Certain Regard Youth Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.  And the Comté cheese by the way, which has also won many prizes in the world of fromage is actually rather delicious.““““““`