“The mountain drives you crazy,” a veteran farmhand tells Mathyas (Felix-Antoine Duval) in “Shepherds,” looking at the copywriter from Quebec who’s come to the French Alps for a simpler life as if he were no different than one of the innocent sheep he’s tasked with tending to. It isn’t easy at first for Mathyas even when he’s willing to offer his services for free to break into the business when he isn’t taken seriously by the farmers that have led sheep across the countryside for generations, but when their skin bears the same creases and toughness as the land they work on, he can be assured it’s only going to get harder, but then again if he wants the satisfaction of putting energy into something greater than himself, nature would seem to offer a lot more than any office building would in the city.
The overwhelming feeling that Mathyas experiences out in the wild comes across undiluted in Sophie Deraspe’s magisterial character study in which it doesn’t seem so crazy to give up the conveniences of urban life for a more isolated existence in the countryside. Based on Mathyas Lefebure’s memoir “Where Are You From, Shepherd?”, the film would seem to offer its writer/director as much of a refreshing change of pace as its lead character after her harrowing contemporary spin on “Antigone” as an immigration drama, but after long being interested in issues of identity, it’s not difficult to see what intrigued her about Lefebure’s decision to leave the rat race and devote himself fully to herding goats, sick of writing pat slogans for advertising agencies and much more fulfilled working out his thoughts for himself in his private journals as he sets off on his grand adventure.
If “Shepherds” follows a relatively well-worn path as Mathyas transforms from city slicker to mountain man, it is given richness by the level of detail that Lefebure surely scribbled in his notebook and Deraspe has brought to the screen when filming on real working farms and Mathyas starts to pick up skills to match his passion. His heart is pulled in other directions as well when his enthusiasm inspires Elise (Solene Rigot), a civil servant he meets while applying for a work visa, to leave her own job after staying in touch via letters, and while a romance seems as predestined as Mathyas becoming adept at delivering a calf, the personal growth required to simply be ready for what comes next is where the intrigue lies when Deraspe ably shows how Mathyas clings onto fantasies of what could be that prevent him from improving the reality in front of him, effectively employing the occasional dream sequence to illustrate how his imagination may have helped him reach the mountains but keep him from seeing the top.
Fittingly, it can look unreal when Mathyas and Elise are tasked with leading hundreds of goats from one end of the Alps to the other for the film’s final stretch after a local asks for help with her flock and the two bring them through the streets of small villages as well as up the hills. However, as Deraspe and crew find an unlikely cinematic epic in Mathyas’ humble pursuit, any grandeur only amplifies the real emotions that the duo have stirring inside and here distance isn’t measured in miles, but how much people can evolve. On that score, “Shepherds” can be as rejuvenating to watch as the effect of being in nature clearly has on Mathyas and while not everyone can drop everything and leave the world behind, Deraspe offers a welcome respite for at least two hours and makes a persuasive case to steal away more.
“Shepherds” does not yet have U.S. distribution. It will next screen at the Vancouver Film Festival on October 3rd at 6 pm at the Fifth Avenue Cinemas and October 4th at 3 pm at SFU Woodwards.