‘The Mohican’: Venice Review

Dir/scr: Frederic Farrucci. France. 2024. 87mins

How are folk heroes created and consecrated? Once, campfire songs and stories or cheap printed ballads were the main channels. Today, social media can do the same job in hours. Corsican director Frederic Farrucci’s tightly-wound second feature charts the transformation of a goatherd into a hero of the French island’s anti-capitalist, anti-mafia resistance after he goes on the run from gangsters bankrolled by property speculators. It’s an island Western that combines a passionate defence of a community threated by a rash of second homes with a clear-eyed assessment of the romantic myth of the freedom fighter. It’s also an efficient man-on-the-run thriller.

Deeply rooted in island culture

Corsican cinema is having a bit of a moment after Catherine Corsini’s 2023 The Homecoming and Julien Colonna’s The Kingdom, which was selected for this year’s Cannes’ Un Certain Regard. It’s unlikely that most distributors will be swayed by talk of a Corsican wave, but the stunning island landscapes and insights into an endangered herding culture should add extra weight to the film’s dramatic credentials after its Venice Horizons premiere and likely festival tour that should easily outpace that of Farrucci’s 2020 debut feature, the Paris-set Chinese triad noir Night Ride.

That first feature won composer Rone (who also scored Jacques Audiard’s Paris, 13^th District) a best soundtrack Cesar. The electronic musician’s atmospheric score for The Mohican morphs from uneasy suspenseful undertow to elegiac requiem, lending resonance to the film’s no-frills, location-shot indie visuals and playing counterpoint to the utterly stripped back performance of Alexis Manenti in the lead role. Known for his turns in Ladj Ly films (he was bad cop Chris in Les Miserables), Manenti inhabits uncommunicative, introverted, borderline reclusive goatherd Joseph so fully – down to the impenetrable Corsican dialect – that you could be forgiven for thinking they had found a real island herder to play the role.

More at ease with his goats than with all but a handful of people, Joseph is the only goatherder left on a coast that is entirely given over to tourism. When he takes his cheeses down to a shop in the nearest town, he’s an ill-at-ease wild man of the mountains surrounded by vacationing urbanites. He’s also the last holdout against a property development scheme that will cover the stunning hills around his farm with yet more luxury villas for rich outsiders. When local mafiosi call to put the pressure on Joseph to sell, he refuses with a kind of stubborn despair. A second visit, this time with guns, leads to the act that will see him take to the hills – after first escaping his pursuers by running down a slope carved up into private villas, each with its own private swimming pool, then across a beach packed tight with sunbathers.

Farrucci contrasts two kinds of community over the hours and days of Joseph’s flight. One is made up of the rustic, rooted old Corsicans who help or protect the goatherd as he roams the island’s mountainous interior, which is shot in a series of ravishing landscape tableaux. Another is the online community summoned up by Joseph’s young niece Vannina (Mara Taquin), who has come back to her childhood home from Paris for the summer. Tagging her uncle as ‘The Mohican’, she unleashes a snowball of sympathy for a man who, in the space of a few days, morphs into a kind of Corsican Che Guevara. Reality and the legend soon converge. Joseph the fugitive starts to see his image on trees, stones and traffic signs. While taking a break in a pub from her own search for her uncle, Vannina realises that a local band have already turned him into a rock song.

Meanwhile, the chase goes on, as Joseph stumbles wounded through spiky bushes and down great scree falls of rock. Even when he holes up with a bunch of shaggy-bearded fellow goatherds who look like the Corsican ZZ Top, The Mohican is careful not to overplay its Western references. This is no Tarantino-esque homage. It’s an angry film about the way violence begets violence and about the dark underbelly of that bourgeois Parisian fantasy – a nice little place by the sea in Corsica. But it’s also an ethnographic study, one that is deeply rooted in island culture. When those gruff, shy herders take Joseph in, they talk not about vendetta, but breeds of goat.