Delphine Lehericey's Le Milieu de l'horizon (2019)

This Swiss-Belgian film is set in an unnamed place in 1976 and adapted from Roland Buti's 2013 novel of the same name. It's entirely set in a rural context, mainly in and around a farm during a period of severe drought in which animals are dying, crops are rotting through lack of water, and a farmer has killed himself due to the situation. Jean (Thibaut Evrard) took his farm over from his father and it now looks as if he's facing ruin.

But Le Milieu de l'horizon is seen exclusively through the eyes of Jean's thirteen-year-old son Gus (Luc Bruchez), who's obviously obsessed with sex, steals soft porn magazines from the local store and gloats over them, even ogles the breasts of his mother Nicole (Laetitia Casta), gets upset when he sees his older sister Léa (Lisa Harder) kissing her boyfriend, etc. So sex in some way or other is his main interest when he's not helping his father and his mentally handicapped cousin Rudy (Fred Hotier) collect up the dead factory-farmed chickens, milk the cattle or whatever.

But at the heart of this film, and really at the heart of the drama (and this is in part what makes the movie so interesting and unusual) is the presence of the new arrival to the film for a few days: Nicole's friend Cécile (Clémence Poésy), who like Nicole appears to be fanatical about a book club they're in. And although we see Cécile handing Nicole a book over the dining room table, we don't actually hear either of them talking about books. Some time later, after Gus's sort-of girlfriend Mado (Sasha Gravat Harsch) and of course Gus himself has discovered the real nature of the relationship, he (in a mixture of embarrassment and disgust) tears out the f.e.p. of a copy of Romain Gary's (here as Émile Ajar) La Vie devant soi. On it was Cécile's confession of undying love to his mother.

And that's a good title to choose: what kind of life does this family have in front of it with a failing farm and a lesbian mother? At the dinner table again, Léa is probably joking innocently when she says Gus is sulking because 'Il est jaloux, il a plus sa maman maintenant' ('He's jealous because he's lost his mother now'). But it's at this same table that Jean will angrily storm at Nicole about her contact with Cécile, and soon the whole village is talking about it and it's going to cause, directly or indirectly, quite an amount of violence. This is a highly watchable psychological thriller certainly shot on a low budget.