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LOUISE COURVOISIER: HOLY COW/VINGT DIEUX (2024) - R-V

Another Cannes 2024 French directorial debut by a female filmmaker like R-V's Wild Diamond, this is worlds apart from that portrait of a would be reality TV star and online influencer. This coming of ager instead is immersed in the traditional world of agriculture and cheesemaking in the Jura mountains. Nowhere near the Côte d'Azur and no lip enhancement or breast enlargement of Agathe Riedinger's Wild Diamond here. This young woman, Marie-Lise (Maïwene Barthelemy) works seven days a week and she rejects the envy of Totone (Clément Faveau), the rosy-cheeked, red-headed party boy who's forced to support himself and his young sibling when his drunken father suddenly dies in a car accident.

Totone flails around. He takes a dairy job (for Marie-Lise's big dairy) that's grueling and exploitive for him and then tries instead making his own prizewinning Comté cheese - making it was what his father did - when he learns the gold medal is thirty thousand euros. He doesn't realize that he hasn't even gotten the certification that would allow his cheese to be considered. And when despite a feud with Marie-Lise's brothers that gets him repeatedly beaten up he starts getting sexual and then romantic with her, at first he repeatedly can'tget it up.

All this, which uses non-actors from the region and real locations, has a richy authentic combination of clumsy earnestness and sincerity and good nature that is very winning, even if as a film perahps Courvoisier's isn't as original or as striking as Riedinger's. What it has though, in spades, is old fashioned French rural spirit. Couroisier has told a story out of the region where she grew up using nothing but real people. And you feel this, but with no awkwardness: she coaxes natural performances from almost everybody.

You get a short course on how to make a wheel of Comté cheese, and you get the traditional cow birthing a calf with a young person helping pull it out. You get local partying, including the custom of a young man stripping his pants off and dancing in front of a sympathetic crowd. It's Totone. And though he keeps messing up, you get the feeling that he's going to do alright.

The [url="https://screenanarchy.com/2024/05/cannes-2024-review-holy-cow-french-cheese-making-dramedy-is-a-finely-crafted-debut-feature.html"]Screen Anarchy [/url] critic sees a Cannes Competition film in the future for this first filmmaker. Another reviewer c[url="https://geekvibesnation.com/holy-cow-review-cannes-2024/"]calls[/url] Courvoisier an Éric Rohmer for the working class. And indeed this is a traditional working class world, not the class-escaping ploy of internet exploiters - though these folks have wi-fi in their farmhouses too, more accessible from what I've heard than what Americans get.

Holy Cow/Vingt Dieux, 92 mins., debuted at Cannes Un Certain Regard, where it won the Prix de la Jeunesse, May 17, 2024, also shown at Karlovy Vary, Jerusalem, Hamburg, Angoulême many other festivals. France released Dec. 11, 2024, with AllocCiné ratings of 4.1 (82%) press and 4.0 spectators (80%). In the US, it is a Zeitgeist Films release in association with Kino Lorber. Sceduled to open at FilmForum, New York, Mar. 28. (Subsequent Metacritic rating: 84%.)
Screened for this review as part of the 2025 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center. Showing:
Saturday, March 8 at 12:30pm – Q&A with Louise Courvoisier.

Highest score. (March. 2025:, showing at Film Forum, NYC. Metacritic rating: 82%.)


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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.