‘Holy Cow’ review: Coming of age and cheese-making in France

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.