This “micro-budget” film about “artisanal cheese making” in rural France could “charm anyone, even the most die-hard cheese hater”, said Larushka Ivan-Zadeh in The Times. Set in a “hardscrabble farming community” in the Jura Mountains, it tells the story of 18-year-old Totone (Clément Favreau), whose carefree adolescence is brought to an abrupt close when his father dies, leaving him “penniless and responsible for his seven-year-old sister”.
Despite “a total lack of expertise”, he decides to enter a Comté-making contest in order to win the €30,000 prize. What follows is a story “immersed in rural, working-class culture” that is “vérité and honest without being bleak”, and which avoids generic conventions while still giving us “a feel good ending that fully satisfies”.
First-time director Louise Courvoisier elicits some “brilliant performances” from her non-professional cast, said Cath Clarke in The Guardian. Favreau (“a poultry farmer in real life”) is “amazingly subtle” as the plucky Totone, while Maïwene Barthelemy is equally “terrific” as Marie-Lise, a worldlier teenage dairy farmer with whom he falls in love.
Courvoisier grew up in the Jura, and she takes care to depict local life authentically, said Alex Hopkins-McQuillan in Little White Lies. We see “the birth of a calf play out in real time” and some impressively “detailed scenes” showing the making of Comté – “a maturing process which offers a neat parallel to our protagonist’s own development”. The film is “a testament to resilience in the face of hardship”, and though it has its share of darkness, it is shot through “with compassion and humour”.
First-time director Louise Courvoisier elicits ‘brilliant performances’ from her non-professional cast
