Only eighteen years old, Totone burns out his life at both ends, in his Jura countryside. His daily life, punctuated by fairs, car races, drinking parties, fights and local festivals of all kinds, however, experiences a major upheaval when his cheesemaker father, after a drunken evening, leaves the road and crashes into a TREE. Now alone to take care of Claire, his seven-year-old little sister, Totone has no other choice, to meet the needs of the household, than to find a job. It is therefore quite natural that he decides to follow his father’s example by getting hired in the local cheese factory. On site, he learns that a competition is being organized to reward the best county in the region; the winner will win a check for thirty thousand euros. Totone then decides to produce his own and pocket the sum; only, he has everything to learn from the profession…
An agricultural, artisanal and family film
With her first feature film, the title of which takes up the popular expression “Twenty Gods”, director Louise Courvoisier undoubtedly gives us one of the most beautiful films of the year. A local story with naturalistic accents that the young woman has every legitimacy to defend, to the extent that she herself comes from the agricultural world and grew up in the region – a journey quite similar to that of the filmmaker Hubert Charuel, who directed Little Peasant in 2017.
Also, it is amusing to note that like the cheeses discussed in the story, the film is the artisanal product of a small family production: Louise Courvoisier’s mother, Linda, and her brother Charlie signed the music, while his sister Ella and his brother Pablo are in charge of the sets. Such coherence between content and form is rare enough in cinema to be underlined. We also welcome the choice of the director to have opted for local, non-professional actors, unearthed during wild castings in the Jura – the main actor, Clément Faveau, works in a chicken farm when his acting partner Maïwène Barthelemy is an apprentice farmer.
A learning story
Both a documentary on the stages of production in the county and a peasant drama, Twenty gods is above all the initiatory story of a young man who goes from the complete carelessness, typical of adolescence, to the taking of responsibilities, characteristic of the transition to adulthood. Because, partly to blame for the death of his father who he was unable to restrain from getting behind the wheel, Totone must assume the consequences of his failings and ensure a decent life for his little sister. Clumsy, his journey throughout the story is bumpy, both in the sentimental domain – which he approaches without the slightest experience – and professional. Too ambitious for him, his county manufacturing project experienced many failures; Totone stumbles repeatedly, misses key stages, but hangs on until the end. The result will probably not live up to his hopes, but for once in his life, he will have set a goal and devoted himself fully to it. Perhaps, the film’s conclusion tells us, he will be luckier sentimentally. In short, a relative success for the character and a great success for Louise Courvoisier, whose career as a filmmaker we will now closely follow.
4 stars out of 5
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