Avis des critiques

A sensitive and almost gentle film, holding within it emotion so intense my heart practically exploded.

While Chinese-born writer-director Chloé Zhao hasn’t attempted to turn the genre entirely on its head, her sophomore feature The Rider reshapes the traditional cowboy narrative in a way that both embraces and challenges western tropes.

An exquisite blend of real-life and fictional narratives brought together by the universal struggle of reconciling your dreams with the constraints of the possible.

Zhao places her film in their hands; and by giving of themselves so generously to Zhao, these contributors are endowed with her aesthetic sensibility and facility with cinematic form. The Rider is a true group effort, with collective and diverse artistic labours producing a work with considerably more nuance, perspective, and sensitivity than it might otherwise have had.

Zhao’s respect for an old-fashioned cowboy tradition — and the South Dakota community it comes out of — is balanced against a multi-leveled social, cultural, and gender-based critique; her rapturous widescreen visuals evince a similar reverence for classic Westerns mitigated by a bobbing, handheld documentary realism.

Despite its pure beauty, in other words, there’s no mistaking The Rider for a simple, crowd-pleasing pick-me-up. The movie is soulful, elegant, filmed as often as not at the magic hour, when the sky is as broad as it is orange yellow, and every nook of the world seems alight with possibility. It is hardly, on its surface, an outright downer. But it’s unmistakably a movie about loss.

It's a film where every actor hums with character and poignancy, a history behind each appearance and a settled weight in the world. And among them also struggles Brady, suffuse in the loneliness of pride. This is a fine film indeed, free in its saddled legacy, riding with sincerity and simplicity.

What Brady achieves—what Zhao films him doing—is exhilarating. His firm but loving approach to Apollo (and, then, to other horses he’s invited to train) is an utterly absorbing display of a talent that involves a vast spectrum of concentration, empathy, courage, self-control, and dexterity, along with a fund of experience and knowledge to draw upon.

The kind of rare work that seems to attain greatness through an almost alchemical fusion of nominal opposites. An account of rodeo riders on a South Dakota reservation, it is so fact-based that it almost qualifies as a documentary. Yet the film’s style, its sense of light and landscape and mood, simultaneously give it the mesmerizing force of the most confident cinematic poetry.

Movies that blend narrative and documentary often find ways to cordon off the fiction from the real life, winking at us when the boundaries have been crossed. Intentionally or not, such films become about the blurring of these lines. But Zhao takes a different approach, privileging the narrative, the poetry, and the realism in equal measure, blending them together to create something astonishingly powerful.

As Brady stews, Zhao opens the film to other members of Brady's community who have reckoned with their physical and mental limits, thoughtfully probing the connection between identity, or the soul, and the body. In one of the film's best scenes, Brady trains a bucking horse, calming its fits with gentle touches, quiet attention, and trust. The Rider skillfully follows suit, accompanying its characters with patience as they acclimate to unanticipated ways of being.

With tactful and empathic grace, the director observes the bovine elegance of rodeo culture without ever putting her own judgment between the camera and her subjects. The result is a solemn and caring portrait of wounded cowboys no longer able to hide their emotions behind muscular perfection, painfully and anti-heroically dealing with their fragility.