by Hudson Moura
Sophie Desrape’s Shepherds (Bergers, 2024) opens with a striking juxtaposition: the immaculate whiteness of the Alpine peaks set against the inert face of a man staring at a hotel ceiling in Arles. That man is Mathyas, a Québécois who has abandoned his life in Montreal—including a career in advertising—to pursue an improbable new identity as a shepherd in southern France.
Loosely adapted from D’où viens-tu, berger ?, the autobiographical account by Mathyas Lefebure, the film follows its protagonist not merely in geographical exile but in existential flight—from capitalism, modernity, and even from himself. In a poignant voice-over, Mathyas confesses that the thought of returning to Montreal sends signals to his brain that might stop his heart. His farewell email to friends and family doubles as a manifesto and a renunciation, culminating in a vitriolic message to his former employer—“You make me sick”—to guarantee there is no path back, an act of symbolic rupture. His objective is to become a shepherd—and write about the experience.
The initial idealism, however, quickly dissolves. After two failed attempts to find work among skeptical locals, Mathyas is finally hired as a farmhand by Gérard and Martine Tellier, who oversee a flock of approximately a thousand Mourerous sheep. His tasks are arduous, ranging from setting up shearing pens to assisting in delivering lambs and administering medication to infected animals. While he longs to observe and learn from seasoned shepherds, his initiation is less apprenticeship than trial by fire.
Desrape deftly avoids pastoral romanticism. Although Mathyas’s voice-over occasionally drifts into metaphysical musing—“awaiting the mountain that will give grass to the ewes and sky to their shepherd”—the film remains firmly grounded in the every day: the ache of muscles, the rhythm of grazing routines, the scent of lanolin and the weight of soaked wool. The cinematography oscillates between observational and seemingly improvised moments, offering a realism that borders on documentary. The mise-en-scène privileges texture and tactility: sheep crowding tight pens, manure-strewn barns, rusted tools, and inhospitable terrain.
The film is most compelling when it foregrounds the dissonance between Mathyas’s idealized vision of rural life and its lived realities. Élise, a civil servant who becomes a correspondent and occasional confidante, names this dissonance when she jokingly calls him a “lost philosopher of the pastures” — a line that encapsulates the film’s core tension between romantic escape and gritty survival. Their epistolary exchange, at once earnest and ironic, becomes a subtle subplot that critiques both escapist fantasies and bureaucratic inertia. Élise herself eventually abandons her post, inspired by Mathyas’s radical break, yet her presence continually re-anchors the narrative in contemporary political and administrative structures.
Crucially, Shepherds captures generational, cultural, and ideological tensions. Mathyas is often perceived as an outsider—a “city boy” with “a weird accent”—and some local shepherds deride him as a naïve romantic or even a “back-to-nature pothead.” Yet others, notably Gérard and Ahmed (his gruff but surprisingly loyal mentor), exhibit a cautious openness. The film stages multiple discussions around the future of pastoralism, with older shepherds lamenting the demise of their traditions under pressure from industrial agriculture, climate change, and bureaucratic regulation. The once-autonomous farms now depend on trucked-in water, and even wool has lost its market value: “We have to pay people to take it after shearing,” one farmer notes bitterly.
Desrape also confronts the legal and institutional challenges of such a lifestyle. Mathyas lacks a work permit and is repeatedly reminded that his presence in France is precarious. A scene at the employment office humorously stages the futility of his request for a permit he cannot legally apply for on French soil. His claim that shepherding is an “existential question” is met with amused bemusement and a rare moment of solidarity: Élise quietly advises him to “work under the table.”
The film’s realism extends beyond physical labor to reinvention of affective and psychological strain. Far from presenting the shepherd’s life as a redemptive arc, Shepherds chronicles moments of disillusionment, humiliation, and even violence. Mathyas endures jeering, administrative rejection, injuries, and the slaughter of sheep—one particularly jarring scene shows him aiding in the bloody dispatch of a ewe with prolapsed intestines. Yet these episodes never push the film into spectacle; they are rendered with matter-of-fact restraint as part of the protagonist’s acculturation.
Shepherds offers a portrait not of transcendence but of endurance. Desrape resists allegory and narrative closure, opting instead for an open-ended realism that honors both the material conditions and symbolic weight of starting anew. The sheep remain indifferent, and the mountains remain silent. What emerges is not a myth of pastoral purity but a chronicle of labor, displacement, and the messy sincerity of seeking another way to live—through aching limbs, dirty hands, and halting prose.
3.5/5