QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN
Tattoos are time capsules. They are graffiti inscribed on a person’s body, preserving momentary whims, feelings and associations in a synchronic snapshot framed by flesh. Nothing quite says that someone has a past than the memorial ink inserted under their skin. Besides his shirtlessness, his shaven head and the fact that he is animatedly talking to himself, one of the first things that we notice about young Cédric Poncet (played by the director Hugo Diego Garcia) as he walks among his herd of cows in an Alpine meadow at the beginning of Vache Folle is the floral tattoo placed prominently on the side of his neck. It is a signifier of a man who is willing to endure pain (the tattoo is located in a particularly sensitive area), and who comes with a history that he wishes to retain.
In Garcia and Lorenzo Bentivoglio’s feature debut, that history is multiple. On the one hand, repeated flashbacks show an idyllic romance with Cheyenne (Laure Valax), even as in the present that relationship has long since soured, and Cédric is now reduced to occasional access to his beloved young daughter Jennifer (Emmy Decastro) for days out, while Cheyenne has settled with the bullying Victor (Victor Nicolai). On the other hand, there are Cédric’s experiences in the French Foreign Legion which have left their traumatic trace in his nightmares. Cédric comes from a long line of legionnaires, and still hangs out with his military buddies Léo (played by the other director, Lorenzo Bentivoglio) and the “old man” (Jo Prestia). On the wall of Cédric’s home hangs a framed picture of the veteran soldier John Rambo from the poster for Ted Kotcheff’s First Blood (1982), framing Cédric’s own status as a returned soldier who struggles to fit into civilian life, and who comes, when pushed to the edge, with a potential for deadly violence.
Unflatteringly nicknamed “Mad Cow” (the English translation of film title) by others because of both his current profession as cowherd, and his reputation for a mad-dog mentality, Cédric is now a gentle, sober man driven by a dream: to take his ex-wife and daughter away with him from this community in decline. He needs to win Cheyenne back and to raise money for a camper van in order to achieve this. The problem is that his farm no longer yields returns, and welfare earnings barely cover his food. So he resorts to selling hash locally, and is soon noticed and recruited as a ‘soldier’ by a vicious Albanian gang of heroin dealers. The rewards are great – great enough to make Cédric’s dream seem possible – but inscribed in the steady rise of this coiled-spring character is a fall. In this high-stakes environment, as Cédric’s private and professional lives become confused, and things spin chaotically out of control, downbeaten Cédric will do what he has to do, regardless of the outcome, as he clings to his image of a happier history.
Running at just shy of one hour and 20 minutes, Vache Folle tells its knowingly generic story with an intense economy. Cédric’s slow (and then rapid) descent into criminality is compressed by the editing of Bentivoglio and Garcia into sweeping, dynamic montages, while flashbacks to the happier past he is so determined to retrieve or recreate are constantly intercut with his unfolding, escalating predicament in the present. It is a lean, mean portrait of masculinity at the margins, where we, confined to Cédric’s perspective (including his PTSD-addled imagination), are never quite sure if we are watching a war-damaged soldier’s reluctant return to Odyssean action and revenge, or just a wish-fulfilment fantasy amid unspeakable tragedy. Either way, it is thrilling – and once those thrills have passed, its preoccupations with poverty traps, abandoned veterans and provincial hopelessness will stay under your skin.
Vache Folle just premiered in the Rebels with a Cause section of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.
