The discussions around women filmmakers at the Cannes Film Festival too often gets caught up political and gender quotas instead of celebrating the tangible achievements of the films themselves. Case in point: Chloé Zhao’s “The Rider,” screened as part of the Directors’ Fortnight parallel section. Recipient of the Art Cinema Award — the top prize in its section — Zhao’s breakout success is in part due to the Fortnight’s nurturing of young voices, having selected her debut, “Songs My Brothers Taught Me,” for its 2015 program. Her follow-up “The Rider” draws upon the mythic iconography of the classical Hollywood Western — the quintessential dude genre — and turns its precepts on their head. Focusing on the indigenous community of the Pine Ridge reservation, Zhao reimagines the entrenched masculine persona of the cowboy. The result is an entrancing, deeply moving effort, one that is certain to steal the hearts of audiences on its wider release.
In our introduction to protagonist Brady Blackburn (Brady Jandreau, playing a variation on his own life), he is removing the bandage from a nasty head wound (seeing his partially-shaved head, a friend quips: “Last of the Mohicans!”). We come to learn that the young man is an up-and-coming rodeo cowboy living with his financially insolvent father and mentally-impaired 15-year-old sister Lilly (Lilly Jandreau) in a trailer in rural South Dakota. The gravity of Brady’s injury — the consequence of being bucked by a horse — is well-communicated by the wince-inducing opening moments. As a residual symptom, his right hand occasionally clenches unconsciously and his fingers have to be pried loose—a harbinger of more severe neurological complications. Brady is left with two choices: either to follow his dream of being a cowboy and horse trainer at the risk of further injury, or resign himself to a passionless life.
Zhao approaches her subject with a disarming sensitivity that destabilizes the codes of masculinity that surround the figure of the cowboy. The “lusty men” (to borrow from Nicholas Ray’s rodeo film) may get into macho fights in “The Rider,” but they also cry, say “I love you” and display affection and concern for one another. The tender interactions between Brady and Lilly are doubtlessly a highlight; her speech is jumbled up and confused, yet he’s always in tune with exactly what she’s trying to express.
With Brady, Zhao puts forth a character that is the archetypal cowboy, and yet still staggeringly soulful and empathetic. It is a nuance that lead Jandreau conveys with sad eyes and the subtlest shifts in expression. First confronted with his injury, Brady is encouraged to “ride through the pain” like a real man, a reality which becomes less and less plausible. “The Rider” isn’t without its pugilism, mind — our cowboy breaks out into a brawl at the first hint of danger to his sister, and constantly battles with his father for alpha male status of their trailer home. The balance lies in the practice of breaking the wild horses, a process that calls upon assertiveness, patience and compassion in equal measures.
Also foregrounded are the main character’s interactions with another former prodigy, Lane (Lane Scott), permanently hospitalized after a debilitating injury of his own. Lane communicates through sign language, which Brady has made the effort to learn solely for the purpose of interacting with his friend — a touching detail that draws no attention to itself. Before every visit, Brady dresses up in his cowboy costume; close-ups are employed to highlight the ritual of tying the kerchief and placing the hat. Together, the two watch YouTube videos of Lane’s achievements, making it painfully clear that the disabled performer brought his personal arc to the character. Astonishingly, “The Rider” steers clear of melodrama in these moments, leaving us to search the men’s faces for the subtlest hint of regret or pride and project our own reading onto the raw nerves on display.
Joshua James Richards’ cinematography — a collision of the intimacy of social realist cinema and the legendary golden hour restrictions made famous by Néstor Almendros with “Days of Heaven”—is nothing less than breathtaking. Richards may borrow the technique of the Terrence Malick film but makes it all his own with the shift in landscape and thematic resonance. The recurrence of vistas with the sun hanging low in the sky is a metaphor for Brady’s central crisis: suspended at the twilight of his career with no sensible way to reverse course. There is also the John Ford connection in the emphasis on vistas, with “The Searchers” obviously an urtext for allusions to the Western and other elements of American mythology. Timeless horizons are employed to optically widen Brady’s personal paradise, exaggerating the gulf between his interior turmoil and the landscape.
There, too, is the question of subverting the racial connotations of previous cinematic depictions of cowboys and the American West. “The Rider” sings with authenticity by celebrating the achievements of the indigenous community (rodeo feats have usurped the cultural position of football here) rather than wallowing in the poverty or systemic substance abuse that exists at the margins of the film (take notes, “Wind River”). Chloé Zhao’s sensitivity to the dynamics of underrepresented segments of American society places her at the forefront of American independent filmmakers, and “The Rider,” no less than Lynne Ramsay’s or Sofia Coppola’s achievements, is a testament to the necessity of women voices to the cinema of any flavor. [A]
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