“Twenty Gods”, a rural Jura western by Louise Courvoisier – rts.ch

At 18, Totone lives in the carefree life of his age in a village in the French Jura. But the death of his father forces him to take responsibility for taking care of his seven-year-old sister.

As the title of Louise Courvoisier’s film suggests, in the form of a local swearword – “Vingt Dieux” – entry into the world of adults is not going to happen by itself for this son of a cheese maker. To get by financially, the young man sets out to make the best county in the region in order to win the agricultural competition and the 30,000 francs that go with it.

A sort of initiatory story, we follow Totone’s journey in “Twenty Gods”, between the creation of the county, the evenings with friends, his relationship with his little sister for whom he is responsible and that with his lover Marie-Lise. Like the cheese he makes – another main “character” in the film – which requires long months of maturing, it will take time for Totone to grow and gain self-confidence.

A tribute to rural youth

Winner of the Youth Prize at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, “Twenty Gods” is the first feature film by Louise Courvoisier, a thirty-year-old director born in Geneva and raised on a farm in Cressia, a village in the French Jura.

And it is in this Jura countryside that she knows so well that she wanted to set the action of her first film. “I wanted to talk about this rural youth that I met, with whom I grew up, and who we rarely talk about,” she explains in the Vertigo show on December 11. And to be as credible as possible, she chose to work with local residents rather than professional actors.

“I didn’t want to cheat on the incarnation of the characters. I wanted us to be able to hear these accents that we never hear”, notes Louise Courvoisier who also mentions having wanted “physics” and a way of moving, difficult to obtain otherwise.

A choice which has its advantages, but which also brought some difficulties for the young director: “I didn’t know how I was going to manage to manage to guide these young people who had never played. It was a lot of work and it took a very long casting process to find those who really looked like my characters and who were comfortable in front of a camera.”

Thus Clément Faveau, who plays Totone, works in a chicken farm and Maïwène Barthelemy, who plays the role of his girlfriend, was spotted in an agricultural high school. As for Totone’s little sister, it was Luna Garret, a girl the director saw growing up in her village, who got the role.

Far from being a feel good movie as one might expect, “Twenty Gods” could be defined as a rural western whose strength resists in the director’s view of her region and its inhabitants.

Comments collected by Anne Laure Gannac

Web adaptation: Andréanne Quartier-la-Tente

“Twenty Gods” by Louise Courvoisier, with Clément Faveau, Maïwène Barthelemy, Luna Garret. To be seen in French-speaking cinemas since December 11, 2024.