Characters say the titular euphemism of Louise Courvoisier’s Holy Cow multiple times throughout the film, usually in a context that bears some relation to a cow. Its first utterance, though, is in response to a show of human folly, when a bystander at a fairground uses it to express shock at the commitment with which teenage Totone (Clément Faveau) responds to a drinking game dare by stripping nude for all to witness atop a table.
It’s quite the introduction to a protagonist who may lack for many things, shame and verve not among them. This hot-headed 18-year-old living in Jura, a rural region in eastern France, doesn’t get the luxury of the gradual coming of age afforded to kids in resource-rich areas. When his father dies suddenly, he’s forced to assume care for his seven-year-old sister, Claire (Luna Garret). Totone gets a job out of sympathy for his situation from a nearby factory owner (Jean-Marie Ganneval), but that quickly disappears when it becomes evident that he has recently tussled with the boss’s two sons outside of the workplace.
With little adult wisdom or guidance in his life, Totone hatches a hare-brained scheme to keep himself and Claire afloat. Rather than work within the established system by contributing to a neighboring farm’s production of Comte cheese, the area’s prized export, he aims to circumvent it. Totone plans to learn how to manufacture his own product independently and enter it into a cash competition. But he and his pals Jean-Yves (Mathis Bernard) and Frances (Dimitri Baudry) face just one small problem: They lack the cow’s milk necessary to produce cheese.
The ever-enterprising and scrappy Totone finds a way to combine work and pleasure when he catches the eye of his former employer’s daughter, Marie-Lise (Maïwène Barthélemy). As the two explore the throes of their adolescent passion around her family farm, his hooligan mates receive cover to pilfer their premium dairy product. Holy Cow finds new relevance in an age-old question: Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?
The disconnect between Totone’s sincere feelings for Marie-Lise and the duplicity of his actions toward her family is a tension that powers the film. Courvoisier and co-writer Théo Abadie never map his behaviors to a delinquent archetype in a way that might suggest that he’s innately incorrigible. Elio Balézeaux’s camera often holds on a shot of Totone’s face and tracks him through a thought process that culminates in a brash action. The film may not always condone his behavior, but there’s never a moment spent with him that it doesn’t understand deeply.
Holy Cow amplifies the authenticity of its underexplored Gallic agrarian setting by populating the frame with first-time, untrained actors. Among the spirited ensemble, the fiery Faveau captivates the most with his effortless, energetic naturalism. His soulful portrayal synthesizes Totone’s default state of pugnacity with his unguarded moments of emotional poignancy.
This unvarnished texture is mostly by design, but it does suffer from bouts of first feature-itis. The script keeps a pleasant pace through some major developments in Totone’s life, though it does hit a few standard genre beats without exploring them to their fullest. Totone’s taciturn nature as a tough country boy explains some of the film’s dwelling on the surface level of interactions rather than exploring them to their fullest. But Holy Cow maintains its breezy, if still brutally forthright, demeanor by favoring narrative expediency over character development.
In the end, it’s the departures from Totone’s rugged reticence that make Courvoisier’s film sing. She’s after something more than a neorealistic portrait of her own former childhood environs in Holy Cow. There’s poetry in how she and editor Sarah Grosset string together scenes across several months in Totone’s meandering journey toward maturity.
At one point, a bar fight smashes directly into the funeral of our protagonist’s father. Amid a montage of merriment, there’s a shot of him and Claire dumpster-diving for food. Within a scene, the camera may bury itself inside Totone’s subjectivity with a close-up before jumping out to a wide shot that contextualizes him against his surroundings. The rhythms and structure of Holy Cow embody the swirling confusion and contradictions of adolescence itself.
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