Writer/Dir: Chloe Zhao | Drama | 100min | US | 2017
Skilfully melding narrative and documentary film techniques, The Rider is set on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and follows a Lakota cowboy after an accident derails his rodeo riding dreams.
Chinese-born Chloe Zhao is a writer, director and producer known for her previous Cannes outing Songs My Brothers Taught Me. Her sophomore featureThe Rider, is a poetic cinema vérité style drama that explores themes of male pride, family loyalty and thwarted ambition through a moodily soulful young cowboy unable to continue his vocation in the rodeo circuit due to a life-changing injury.
Showcasing the magnificent mountains and windswept prairies of America’s Badland’s National Park, South Dakota, the film has a cast of able non-professional actors Brady Jandreau, Tim Jandreau, Lilly Jandreau and Lane Scott who star alongside Cat Clifford (from Songs) making this resonant action drama feel both authentic and informative on the subject of horse training and competitive riding.
Zhao convincingly conveys the wild excitement and thrilling danger of this male-dominated world where young cowboys become addicted to the high octane buzz of the rodeo that sizzles with angst and poignant moments. Macho bravado must be tempered with patience and gentle coaxing in order to tame and tackle the wild horses and train them to be ridden, and this is where Brady shines with his innate ability.
Brady dearly loves his family, his father is a disappointment to him, drinking and gambling on the slot machines. But he also fails to comprehend the weight of responsibility left to his dad when Brady’s mum died leaving him to bring up his two siblings: his brother has been left brain-damaged from a rodeo accident and his kind-hearted sister clearly has learning difficulties.
After a fall competing in the circuit, where he was once a leading star, the film derives its needling tension from Brady’s struggle to face a future in the real world where he works in a supermarket, and his former life in the wild outdoors riding and training his horses.
This is Brady’s film and he gives a mesmerising and deeply moving turn (with echoes of Montgomery Clift in The Misfits), as a man so deeply connected to the land and his horses that he doesn’t know where else to go. @MeredithTaylor
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The Rider won the Art Cinema Award at CANNES 2017 and National US Critics’ Award 2018