Rodeo

In the foreground, the subject matter of Lola Quivoron's film 'Rodeo' is a young woman's love of motorbikes; but it's really about growing up not just poor but essentially uncared for, in an environment of low mutual trust, and the kind of person that turns you into in order to be able to survive. In places it reminded me of Eric Zonca's brilliant 'The Dream Life of Angels'. It's not as good as that film: the plotting is both thin and strained (especially as it approaches a rather odd conclusion), but when in obsevational mode, it convinces, and Julie Ledru gives a very strong performance in the lead role.

I stumbled across this movie while on a recent foreign/independent film craze. As the storyline suggests, it concerns a woman whose sole obsession involves getting her hands on and riding dirt bikes by any means possible. The woman and lead is apparently played by a non-professional actor and I feel she does a very credible job at portraying the role of a social misfit who has no job or other source of income and has to resort to stealing dirt bikes to satisfy her only interest. Although she is described as being young in the storyline, she's definitely not a teenager and judging by appearance possibly in her mid to late 20s. It's also evident that she is not an accomplished stunt rider.

Early on, she happens upon an illicit street bike rodeo and tries with some difficulty to ingratiate herself with one group of guys participating in the rodeo. As she slowly gains some acceptance from most, but not all of the group, you learn that they make an illicit living by reselling bikes with stolen parts out of a garage owned by their leader who happens to be in prison.

A 6 rating might be a little generous from my perspective, but I did watch the film all the way through and found the story interesting that I didn't feel I had wasted my time. I would hesitate to recommend this film though, unless the viewer has a particular interest the culture associated with young men trying to make a living with their dirt bikes.

The stunt riding looked pretty basic from my perspective and does not occur throughout the film. It was also difficult to comprehend how the final scene could physically happen the way it was shown, but it didn't necessarily spoil the rest of the story and was possibly intended as a symbolic conclusion to the tale.

Julie (Julie Ledru) lives with her mum with whom she has a tempestuous relationship, but what she dreams about is bikes. So she joins a biker gang and does the sort of thing that biker gangs do. Which as far as I can tell is ride bikes, steal bikes, fix bikes, talk about bikes and various other bike-related activities. But, are they really ready to accept a WOMAN in their gang? Go on, guess...

About halfway through the film, Julie does get to meet Ophelie (Antonia Buresi), another woman who's not entirely part of the gang. The introduction of a relationship with different drivers does benefit the film, even if it's not exactly a particularly well constructed relationship occurring between two characters that you struggle to sympathise with or relate to.

And then there's the ending - where do I start with that? In theory, it's based around a good idea with a big heist that involves all the team which is either going to draw them all together or expose fatal faultlines. But it's only really introduced ten minutes before the end so it's all very rushed and it all ends in a VERY bizarre way - I've absolutely no idea what Lola Quivoron, the writer and director was thinking. Although, to be fair, there is a nice coda - but it's so not worth sitting through the entire film to experience it.

As you can possibly tell, I was not massively impressed by the film's story - it has a few conflicting good ideas in there but it doesn't feel to me like it really knows what it wants to concentrate on at any point in time, so it all ends up being a bit of a mess with a bizarre ending. A lot of the action (unsuprisiingly) takes place on bikes and it all looks to be technically well done - some of the tricks are undoubtedly impressive, but I've no idea whether the filming is easy or tricky to do so I don't want to go overboard on any praise here. I'd also say that you're not going to watch the film for the tricks either - three minutes on YouTube will probably serve you just as well.

The acting is fine - it's all pretty rough and ready but I wasn't really expecting Daniel Day-Lewis levels of "art" here. Julie Ledru carries the film well enough, but I'm not sure she'll be moving on much greater things - Antonia Buresi suffers somewhat from having to be quite unpleasant when we first meet her and it seems like unpleasant isn't her strong suit, but as the relationship thaws her acting improves. I'm also going to mention Cody Schroeder as Kylian, Ophelie's six(?) year old son because he acts the pants off most of the other actors involved - but to be fair to them, very few of the supporting characters are anything more than very sketchily drawn out.

This isn't a terrible film, but it's also not great - it's also disappointing that doesn't feel like it would have taken an awful lot of effort to make it considerably better. There's also absolutely no way it was one of the 50 best films of 2023 and I've no idea what The Guardian was thinking of in picking it. If you still want to watch it after that glowing review then it's available to stream on BFIPlayer or to rent on Apple TV but the only reason to do so is that I'd then have someone to discuss the ending with...