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, saccharine coming-of-age debut feature, “Holy Cow,” acceptable successful a cheese-making pouch of France’s Comté region, is simply a lively welcome. After the head-scratching show of a calf successful the rider spot of a compact car, we travel a burly antheral with a keg done a packed fairgrounds populated by radical and livestock, earlier landing connected Totone (Clément Faveau), a blitzed, flush-faced teenage lad each excessively consenting to ascent connected a array and portion for a taunting crowd.

Comté, a gorgeous, mountainous agelong of land, is (the film’s revelry aside) a distant enclave of exacting work, wherever the well-treated red-and-white Montbéliarde breed of cattle is the prima employee. Meanwhile, the dairy farmers’ hot-headed, party-hearty offspring look similar the animals successful request of taming. As we get to cognize the movie’s wiry, chaotic young protagonist, engagingly portrayed by first-time histrion Faveau, we expect he’ll get a beingness acquisition the hard way, arsenic these stories usually connection up. But similar the past cheese-making process shown passim the movie successful fascinating glimpses of handmade toil — arsenic if a Les Blank abbreviated documentary had mixed with a Dardennes brothers play — “Holy Cow” achieves its ain peculiar texture and spirit the much its cardinal quality boils, curdles and cools.

Totone’s preferred regular cycle, with buddies Jean-Yves (Mathis Bernard) and Francis (Dimitry Baudry) successful tow, is short-term pleasure-seeking: drinking, dancing, hitting connected girls, puking, passing out, waking up, laughing astir it, repeating. He knows a spot astir the sweat and dedication of his father’s world. But the world of its value to their livelihood doesn’t deed him until dad’s ain end-of-day drinking results successful a fatal car mishap and Totone is near to look aft his younger sister, Claire (Luna Garret). Selling disconnected workplace instrumentality isn’t enough; it’s besides hard to support a caller occupation astatine different family’s dairy erstwhile the boss’ sons are your after-hours enemies, speedy to combat astatine the slightest provocation.

But erstwhile Totone learns that his region’s Gruyère-like specialty tin onshore a 30,000-euro payday from a contest, he’s spurred, with his friends’ help, to revive his family’s cognition and marque a prizewinning Comté cheese. He invites further trouble, though, erstwhile helium starts hooking up with newbie dairy husbandman Marie-Lise, played by different well-cast newcomer, Maïwène Barthelemy. Totone likes her, for sure, but helium besides wants to get adjacent capable to bargain her cows’ high-quality milk.

That the tough, hardworking and no-nonsense Marie-Lise is the 1 who initiates this narration with Totone makes her forthright quality a wonderfully stereotype-defying snapshot of a pistillate laboring successful this world, arsenic if the farmer’s girl successful that age-old script tin present conscionable beryllium 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 successful agriculture villages similar the ones successful her film, makes that coincidence number successful presumption of small-town authenticity — of course, everyone’s connected — and the melodramatic stakes that spell with impulses and shortcuts. Her rhythms evoke some the vigor and quiescent hum of agrarian life, with cinematographer Elio Balézeaux’s charismatic widescreen framing capturing a scope betwixt tactile quality intimacy and beauteous wide landscapes.

Perhaps astir crucially, “Holy Cow” keeps its sights acceptable connected being a survey successful fast-tracked adulthood, minus judgement oregon sentimentality. The French are arsenic bully astatine this benignant of communicative arsenic they are with their legendary cheeses and Courvoisier is nary exception, capably revealing how, acquisition by lesson, Totone tempers his distractable quality and answers his delayed grief with a consciousness of intent and work that starts to look similar increasing up. Commitment, timing and patience marque for a delightfully mature bite.