“Sometimes we grow up simply because there's no way back.”
— Friedrich Dürrenmatt
Totone is neither a rebel nor a hero. He is a boy in the making. His universe—the Jura, a region of pastures and fine cheeses—takes shape as a profane altar where every agricultural gesture has lost its sacredness. His father, a farmer and an alcoholic, vanishes from the scene through death: a tragically coherent exit that draws the curtain on a drama of silent survival. From that moment, Totone is called to “grow up”—not by choice, but by legal imposition. And the law of adulthood is ruthless, especially when it demands the guardianship of a younger sister, Claire, who remains a purely ethical event, a mute urgency, a presence impossible to ignore.
But there is no epic in growing up. Only the industrious misery of daily life, sullied by clumsy nocturnal transgressions, off-key parties and short sleep, painful awakenings, and responsibilities that grate against an immature body. Childhood time is buried under the urgency of survival: the milk must be drawn, the deliveries made at dawn. He rises at four in the morning to begin the milk collection rounds. And when he brings along a Coca-Cola, he ends up vomiting: the night before, he drank and danced with friends, derailing once again from the path of composure.
Economy is never just about money: it’s biology, it’s substance transforming into something else, it’s a form of resistance. And so the possibility of redemption—the thirty thousand euros for the best Comté in the region—becomes less a prize than a temporary ideology. There is no dream, only necessity. Totone then looks to the wrinkled hands of the elderly, to gestures inherited rather than learned. Transmission happens not out of love, but through proximity. One learns by observing, imitating, wordlessly.
And cheese—that product of time, of mold, of silence—imposes itself as a living metaphor for growth. One does not become an adult: one ferments, goes rancid, coagulates. The vat to clean, the quality control, the work at ten euros an hour—every task is a form of raw apprenticeship. But the world gives nothing back. The dairy managers—including the son of the man whose head Totone once cracked open—show neither understanding nor mercy. He is beaten, then fired after yet another impulsive reaction, one more defeat absorbed without appeal.
So he reinvents himself: he goes independent, supported by an unlikely solidarity among peers. The goal is simple, necessary, fierce: win the medal. And to do so, he turns to her—Marie-Lise—the tough farmer running a business on her own, who helps cows give birth while Totone steals milk, who doesn’t talk but acts. With her, he discovers sex, not as elevation but as an animal adherence to reality. Desire does not redeem: it consumes. It is physiology, a gesture parallel to milking, to storage, to coagulation.
Courvoisier films the countryside without nostalgia, with an attention that neither judges nor consoles. The atmosphere is thick with smells: dung, hay, animal musk. And when desire bursts in, it does so with the same roughness as a cow being drained. The sex between Totone and Marie-Lise is not eroticism—it’s exchange. A grappling of bodies that confuses friendship and responsibility, action and awareness.
“The body has no morals: it hungers, it thirsts, it needs.”
— Jean-Luc Nancy
In the murky magma of marginal lives, Vingt dieux—renamed Holy Cow! for English-speaking markets, as if to sanctify it with a more exotic exclamation—marks Louise Courvoisier’s uneasy entry into cinema. Presented in Cannes 2024’s Un Certain Regard section, the film made its mark like a crack in the polished surface of coming-of-age stories. Beneath the bold title, the director sketches an unredeemable youth drift, in a rural France where rites of passage are consumed not with torches, but with raw milk, sweat, and bacterial cultures.
The film sidesteps the trap of sentimentality. Totone has no epiphanies, no redemptions: only tasks, schedules, stubbornness. Courvoisier’s cinema is rooted in reality like a lucid infection. She works with non-professional actors and real materials, without embellishments, with a documentary-like clarity—but one that opens into poetic fissures: the milk container, for instance, becomes a near-totemic object. The director calls it “religious,” and it’s not a far-fetched metaphor: it’s a testament to how even a vessel can be sacred, if experienced intensely.
In the cauldron—round, warm, ready to receive—one reads the entire arc of the film: what is gathered, mixed, awaited, can become substance. But only through labor and patience. Holy Cow! is this: an elegy of becoming, a rough ode to unchosen responsibility, a hymn to the time that transforms matter and, with it, the human. A bitter, melancholic, animalistic fable—where love and friendship, perhaps, can still brush against the irretrievable.
“We weren’t prepared for reality. Only for the idea of it.”
— Simone de Beauvoir
