PARIS – Killing time at the bus stop, getting lost in the books: the brilliantly written ‘Le chien de la casse’, the first film to be released on Wednesday, shatters stereotypes about rural youth and confirms the potential of its leading actor. Raphael Quenard.

“The junkyard dog is the egoist, the crevard, the guy who trades for his pear at the expense of his friends,” the director summarizes for AFP this film, which tells of a friendship between two young men, interpreted by Anthony Bajon, a must-see since “La Prière” and Raphaël Quenard (notably seen in the “HP” series) in a village in the Hérault.

One is taciturn and dreams of joining the army, the other is a small tradesman, an eloquent and literary man who dominates him to the point of suffocation. The arrival of a young girl (Galatea Bellugi) will rock the situation.

The film, which won the Audience Award at the Premiers Plans d’Angers Festival, follows the experience of director Jean-Baptiste Durand, who grew up in a Midi village and couldn’t stand films that “peasants who live there have the intelligence of the heart”.

“From the very beginning, as a young villager, I wanted to draw and paint rural youth,” the filmmaker, who first studied at Beaux-Arts, told AFP.

“I felt like there was a real void of representation. I only found myself in suburban movies when it wasn’t about us at all. Nobody talked about us,” he continues.

“I felt an intimate need to speak about this youth, the ‘Bus Stop Lascars,’ and their relationship to friendship and brotherhood,” he adds.

It is also not found in the many works on “class defectors”: “Class defectors, nothing at all! In these villages there are petty bourgeois and workers’ sons, a real social mix. The relationship to culture is more intimate there, more necessary, we have much more time to read in the country, no matter what social class, my friends had tons of books!”.

A love of books that shines through in the character of Raphaël Quenard, a mix of lowercase writer and letter lover. With the actor (last seen in November and I’ll Always See Your Faces), the director evokes “a real encounter”: “We’ve hung out in the same places, we’ve experienced the same things, we come from the same backgrounds “.