Holy Cow: thoughtful coming-of-age tale about a teen Comté-maker resists cheesiness

In France’s Jura region, a laddish 18-year-old becomes the family breadwinner when his father suddenly dies. While working on a local dairy farm, he devises a plan to win a cheesemaking competition with a cash prize of €30,000, learning important romantic and culinary lessons in the process.

In rural France, on a sweltering summer’s day, a middle-aged woman dunks her bare arms into a vat of scalding milk. In front of a crowd of stunned onlookers, she explains that she has five seconds – and importantly, one chance – to pull what she needs from the vessel. With undeniable swagger, she swiftly retrieves the curds that will become Comté, a sweet, nutty, buttery cheese made from unpasteurised cows’ milk, famous in France’s Jura region. The fromagère is given a rock star’s applause. In the crowd, a strawberry-blond teenager frowns, making a mental note.

For 18-year-old Totone (Clément Faveau), the ruddy-cheeked son of a farmer and fromager, a blissful summer of drinking beer and flirting with girls stretches ahead. A successful day might involve getting plastered at the county show, hitching a ride home on the back of a pretty girl’s scooter and urinating on her mum’s flower beds. “What’s your name again?” he asks a one-night stand in bed, voice thick with booze and bluster. That he can’t get it up doesn’t stop him from sending her a topless mirror selfie the following day.

But when Totone’s father dies in an accident, the carefree (and careless) teenager is forced to grow up. Saddled with the family’s failing farm and his kid sister Claire (Luna Garret), Totone quickly lands a job at a nearby dairy, but it’s hardly enough to get by. A solution presents itself in the form of a Comté-making competition, with a top prize of €30,000. The milk, he figures, he can skim from his new workplace. The stakes are raised when he starts sleeping with dairy-farmer Marie-Lise (Maïwene Barthelemy). Writer-director Louise Courvoisier grew up on the French-Swiss border and is attuned to the raw beauty of her native Jura. Natural light floods barns filled with straw and verdant fields are covered by mist and dotted with mooing cows. But the filmmaker skewers romantic idylls by depicting the unglamorous realities of working-class country living, too. Unable to survive on Totone’s wage alone, the siblings dumpster-dive, pulling Nesquik from a bin; when they attempt to make their own cheese, they scoop up the curds with a blue plastic dustpan. At his father’s funeral, Totone wears a hoodie and jeans as he helps to lower the casket. The other attendees briskly pay their respects in tracksuits, before getting on with the rest of the day’s work.

The cheesemaking set pieces, on the other hand, are shot with an almost sensual gaze that emphasises the human factor in small-scale food production. There is no mechanical temperature gauge to tell Totone when the curds are ready. Instead, he must rely on touch and intuition.

The film’s English title Holy Cow is a somewhat awkward translation of the French Vingt Dieux, an interjection with an old-fashioned, rural connotation. Still, it works as both a reference to the film’s sacred dairy cows, whose milk will become precious artisanal cheese, and a cheeky, winking exclamation. The film’s coming-of-age arc tracks Totone’s growing emotional and sexual maturity. Courvoisier’s first feature draws amusing parallels between the delicacy needed to produce Comté and the similar patience and finesse required to please a woman. With her shaggy bob and sturdy work ethic, Marie-Lise has an earthy femininity and a straightforward sexual frankness that ends up freeing Totone from restrictive ideas about how to be a man. Faveau’s performance as a teenage boy struggling to express his emotions is unshowy but fine-tuned; as his romance with Marie-Lise blooms, Totone begins to soften. Meanwhile, it is the female characters who get their bare hands (and arms, and elbows) dirty, delivering calves without flinching and reaching into cauldrons of hot liquid. Even seven-year-old Claire displays a specific, world-weary intelligence, complaining, “I’m not wearing my pyjamas!” as she attempts to find clean clothes to wear to school. Garrett, the young actress who plays her, has a child’s demeanour, but the wise face of an older woman.

A PDO certificate, declaring the protected designation of origin of Totone and Claire’s product, is needed to enter the Comté competition. The cheese itself must be ripe to win it. An expert who tries Totone’s effort remarks that “it’s too young to taste it,” a perhaps-too neat metaphor for the film’s still-maturing protagonist.

► Holy Cow is in UK and Irish cinemas from 11 April.