text by Maisie McDermid
Following the sunburned back of an older man carrying a beer keg towards a crowd of thirsty teenagers in a field, French director and part-time farmer Louise Courvoisier introduces the audience to Jura—a low mountainous region in eastern France. The sweaty group gathered around a makeshift bar begins cheering and yelling a local chant as Holy Cow’s central character, Totoné (Jura local, Clément Faveau), lifts himself onto the wooden bar table. One second, he’s red-cheeked, smoking, and smiling, and the next, he follows orders from below: to strip off his clothes. So he does, and we meet Totoné—a character who simultaneously makes you want to chuckle and cry.
Premiering in the Un Certain Regard section of Cannes in May 2024, the small independent film raked up two César Awards, including Best First Film, and is now touring globally. In its simplest form, 18-year-old Totoné navigates a forcibly rushed entry into adulthood. He pivots from mourning his dead father to committing to a regional cheese-making competition. In doing so, he finds and loses love, tries and fails at being a friend, and clumsily raises his seven-year-old sister, Claire.
In her debut feature film, Courvoisier, a native to the Jura region, attends to the environment as she does to her non-professional cast of characters. She dresses many of them in red, drawing out the surrounding greenery, and documents the film primarily outdoors. Amidst it all—long bathtime stills, winding motorbike clips, flashed scenes of drunken, loose dancing, and kicks and punches—you see Totoné, a character who seeks to be unseen. Up-close shots of his expressive face bring you up-close to his inner thinking. After a while, you realize he really does not know how to act when other characters really look at him; on the rare occasion, he drops his eyes and somewhat sways. In this way, Courvoisier gives you access to a character who others find inaccessible. From seeing him in the initial scene, butt-naked, to the final scene, smiling with a tear in his eye, you develop an unmatched empathy. It's Faveau’s inexperience in acting that makes this film shockingly honest.
While Courvoisier and cinematographer Elio Balézeaux clearly demonstrate their distinct filming techniques—framing many shots in car-window rectangles, behind dusty window panes, and amidst the repeated circular shapes of cheese wheels—the film slips through subtle scenes. It’s the deeply considered yet casual air to each shot that exposes the utter beauty of dirty and dusty farmlife. Courvoisier builds suspense with picked guitar chords and slows scenes with soft, strumming instrumentals, creating a raw world for complex yet relatable relationships to move through an unpredictable plot. Although the falling-outs and mendings between Totoné and his first love, Marie Lise (Maïwene Barthelemy) and his two best friends, Jean-Yves (Mathis Bernard) and Francis (Dimitry Baudry) arise from peculiar scenarios, they encapsulate a widely known and remembered youthful temper.
Courvoisier stages Totoné’s make-out scenes with Marie in unmade, dirty beds and piles of hay, drawing on the young lovers’ desperation for discovery. She spins us around a kitchen table littered with liquor from three guy friends awkwardly dancing side-by-side to blasting Bad Bunny, glimpsing into small-town drinking culture. And invites us into the in-between moments—Totoné and Claire asleep on a tired couch with Claire’s small bowl of spaghetti balanced on her leg or Totoné walking down a narrow hallway fixing his hair, his signature habit.
Not every scene has an objective purpose, but this is perfectly fine. The drawn-out scenes of Totoné laying out on his bed mid-day or of Claire playing with Totoné’s hair prove how in-between moments define life, not milestones. Holy Cow is not about moving past a relative’s death, reconciling lost friendships, or winning a competition; it’s about the ongoing nature of grief, loss, and disappointment. The unfinished aspects of the film—from cut-off conversations to incomplete plot points—actually make this film true.
Watch the Holy Cow trailer here.