Director: Sophie Deraspe
Writers: Sophie Deraspe, Mathyas Lefebure
Stars: Félix-Antoine Duval, Solène Rigot, Younes Boucif
Synopsis: A young Montreal advertising executive, converted to a Provençal shepherd, has various misadventures with a civil servant who has cavalierly quit her job.
Ten years after The Wolves (Les Loups), Sophie Deraspe gives us her companion piece of sorts to her Nature Reclaims its Rights unofficial duology with Shepherds (Bergers). Of course, one can immediately see the parallels between the two just by reading the titles: Wolves eat sheep. It’s how they survive in the arid environment they live in (in this case, the French Alps) and balance out the violent, often cruel world humans inhabit. But it also shares a common thread by way of a protagonist who decides to give up his current, modern life for something more primal and real.
Many will jokingly state that Shepherds is essentially “Reject Modernity, Embrace Tradition: The Movie,” but that’s what it actually is. Our protagonist, Mathyas (Félix-Antoine Duval) literally rejects his lifestyle as an advertising executive, out of the blue, to become a shepherd. What prompted this? Who knows, and who cares! It’s the most unimportant detail of the entire film, because we meet him, in media res, doing everything he can to ensure no one will hire him again. He’s completely foregoing his career in Canada, hoping to attain a form of meaning by learning the art of shepherding. He may also learn what it’s like to be alive, which could be a plus.
That’s not my interpretation of the film, but Deraspe stated during a post-screening Q&A at the Cinemania Festival in Montreal. One can immediately see it in Mathyas’ childlike eyes (Duval is fantastic throughout the entire movie but is particularly compelling when he becomes ‘innocent’ in the perception of the people who take him as an apprentice) when he stumbles upon a group of expert shepherds in the hopes of becoming one himself. At first, the patrons laugh at him, and predictably so. Who in their right mind would want to do such a job? Not only is it painstakingly difficult, but it gets increasingly complicated when you factor in a changing climate, making conditions difficult for both sheep and shepherds. Worse yet, wolves are getting hungrier as the environment also affects their balance.
Mathyas finds out the hard way that herding sheep is not an easy task and gets a taste of how corruptible it can be when your entire finances are backed on meat and milk production. If something catastrophic happens, it affects the sheep and humans equally. But the animals may not know the world they’re brought into or what they need to do, making this endeavor so complex and unrewarding. However, since his resolve is so strong, he gets better at it and eventually brings civil worker and new love interest Élise (Solène Rigot) into the proceedings when accepting an offer too good to refuse from Cécile (Guilaine Londez) in desperate need of a shepherd.
It’s there that Deraspe begins to show how nature will always have control over human behavior, regardless of its path or actions. The first half of Shepherds demonstrates humans attempting to toy with nature, often abusing the sheep, either verbally or physically (one accidentally kills a baby after slamming a door). They only perceive the animals as a way to make money and constantly demean their place in nature, so much so that when one part of the herd is sick, its owner (Bruno Raffaelli) rams his car straight into them.
These scenes are shot and staged with a cruel lens from cinematographer Vincent Gonneville (slowly becoming a favorite of mine with his work in Annick Blanc’s Hunting Daze and Meryam Joobeur’s Who Do I Belong To? this year), who never directly shows us the violence, but implies it enough that we feel it deep into Mathyas’ eyes. One such scene has him witness a sheep getting their throat slit, which is far too much to stomach. However, he’s directly confronted by the dehumanizing nature of human beings, who do not treat their sheep as equals but as controlling objects to be sold and exploited to serve their own personal gains.
This thesis statement immediately harkens back to Emmanuel Kant’s radical evil, in which the very tendency to be evil is natural within human beings who begin to act on their own self-interests. This was dominant in The Wolves, and it’s now exemplified here, though in a much different fashion than in Deraspe’s 2014 film. In The Wolves, Élie (Evelyne Brochu) leaving Montreal to arrive in a rural town makes her the butt of the joke with its inhabitants and destabilizes the natural order of things, corrupting her soul and progressing in a far darker direction than she initially envisioned.
In Shepherds, Mathyas’ experience doesn’t corrupt him, but others around him. His previous boss goes barking mad, while his mentor reaches a point of no return after murdering a healthy baby sheep. As he gains more experience in this world, Mathyas achieves clarity and finally understands his existence on this planet. Unfortunately, this has drastic consequences for the sheep and their environment. The climate becomes more terrorizing, leading to a bravura thunderstorm sequence that deftly illustrates who is in charge of us all.
Gonneville’s handheld camera plunges us into this cataclysm, and the enveloping sound design only exacerbates the pure horror Mathyas and his sheep experience in the middle of the storm. It’s Deraspe’s most impressive-ever sequence in a movie that foregoes long, dialogue-heavy scenes (which sank her last film, Antigone) in favor of pure contemplation. Had she removed the voiceover narration that placates many of its most visually impressive sequences, Shepherds could’ve been an even better movie than it already is, a more complete picture on the return to tradition and nature than The Wolves.
There’s an actual exploration of the characters’ space, a genuine desire to sit with them and not bring any half-baked intrigue with a plot twist that lands in an absolute thud (*coughswolvescoughs*). In fact, there’s no intrigue. It’s all about how the film’s protagonist reconnects with himself and has a more positive outlook on his place on this planet than he did while working for a capitalist machine that has never, and will never, give him any form of meaning either in his artificial wallet or in his psychological wellbeing.
At the end of Shepherds, it’s clearer-than-clear that this entire movie has been about how nature will always have the last word, and no one can ever be tempted to challenge it. In that regard, Deraspe joins the pantheon of Québec films that have embraced nature as a very part of our province, either in Sébastien Pilote’s Maria Chapdelaine, Guy Édoin’s Mariages, Rafaël Ouellet’s Camion, or, more recently, Anne Émond’s Lucy Grizzli Sophie. Though at the point where Mathyas realizes that he can’t and won’t change the course of nature’s wrath, he has finally attained something his previous life never allowed him to. That seems more than enough.
