Little Peasant: Murderous Milkman (review)
Long before Anatomy of a Fall, Swann Arlaud had conquered Première thanks to this successful first film.
Hubert Charuel received the César for best first film in 2018 for Little Peasant, a unique work, between rural drama and mental thriller. At its output, First had supported this original feature film which will be rebroadcast this Monday evening on France 5.
Since this success, its main performer Swann Arlaud has been a hit thanks to the Palme d'Or Anatomy of a fallby Justine Triet.
Little Peasant: meeting with the film crew
Little Peasant features Pierre, a young dairy farmer passionately in love with his work and his cows which he pampers with loving attention. His social life is deliberately limited, his emotional life flirts with nothingness. The day one of his animals is struck by a virus from Belgium, his world collapses. Dark stone…
Son and grandson of farmers, Hubert Charuel broke with family tradition by attempting (and succeeding) in Fémis. No one knows what the rural world has lost but everyone will be able to see what the 7e art has won: a director with an original universe, who draws as much from the French naturalist heritage as from American genre cinema – we don't have to heat him up too much for him to cite Tarantino, the Coens endlessly. , Scorsese, let’s move on.
Ultra-realistic (it was filmed on the family farm with relatives as guest stars), his film shines with its expressionist photography and its visions bordering on surrealism. We think of Claire Denis who, too, likes to anchor her films in specific contexts to better twist them to her strange and restless obsessions.
Docufiction and mental thriller
Shifting is at the heart of Little Peasant. That of a way of life and production (Pierre works in the old-fashioned way) but, above all, that of a man overcome by paranoia and haunted by the fear of erasure: the end of his farm would also mean his own. . Charuel transcribes in the best possible way the peasant's malaise, which translates both into a powerful presence in the world (the side “earthling”) and an inexorable feeling of abandonment on the part of the public authorities, by embedding it in a story that resembles a mental thriller.
We learn (you will know everything about health checks) while being intrigued, baffled by Pierre's choices, dictated by his declining mental health. We also have fun, the interaction between the hero and his sister, a pragmatic veterinarian, operating according to the principle of the mismatched duo. Carried by the hallucinatory interpretation of Swann Arlaud, Little Peasant really off the beaten track. No pun intended.
Swann Arlaud, new star of social networks thanks to her “sexy” role in Anatomy of a Fall
