Sophie Deraspe’s Canadian-French film (English title ) is about the existential angst and latent desires of many city-slickers who find themselves on a perennial treadmill when it comes to their profession. How wonderful would it be to disappear from the everyday traps—the familiar places and people, the daily grind and routine—and retreat into a radically opposite world where the pace is slow, and a job is about physical effort rather than intense mind games. In other words, it is about simplicity and frugality rather than materialism, about contentment than the pursuit of success.
The film won the Best Canadian Feature Film award at the recently concluded Toronto International Film Festival. Based on Mathyas Lefebure’s semi-autobiographical novel, , it is about a burnt-out advertising professional from Montreal, who ups and leaves one fine day for the South of France with the dream of becoming a shepherd in the French Alps. He sets up base in Arles in Provenance and is sure that he is not going back.
Mathyas (Felix-Antoine Duval) is later joined by a French bureaucrat Elise (Solene Rigot) who has been feeling similarly constricted and secretly longing for an escape. However, the road to liberation is not easy for either of them. The shepherds ridicule the “city boy who has never herded” as a “back to nature pothead”, and warn him that the “cradle of pastoralism” doesn’t exist and that industrial farming has spoiled the grasslands.
As Mathyas begins wor.