‘Rodeo’: Born to be wild
Julia, the heroine of the French film “Rodeo,” is a machine that runs on gasoline and indignation. She’s mad at her mother, her brother and the world — not necessarily in that order — and channels her resentment into victimizing Parisian suburbanites who advertise used Japanese motorcycles for sale. She insists on a test ride, hands over a rockfilled purse as collateral, then takes off and doesn’t look back. Stealing and riding are equally exhilarating.
As played by Julie Ledru, a nonprofessional making her acting debut in a role partly based on her own biography, Julia is ferocious and nearly tireless. She’s introduced in motion and in closeup, during a hallway scuffle shot in a documentary-like style with handheld camera, available light and jumpy editing. Co-writer and first-time feature director Lola Quivoron sticks with this mode throughout the film. But she tempers it with visual references to classic American cowboy movies and brief moments when Julia’s reveries become visible to the viewer. “Rodeo” is 95 percent naturalistic and 5 percent hallucinatory.
The film’s style is kinetic, intimate and immersive. Quivoron, assisted by cinematographer Raphaël Vandenbussche and editor Rafael Torres Calderon, stays close to the characters and rarely employs wider shots. Leaps in continuity help set an unpredictable rhythm, as does a soundtrack that toggles between ambient sounds and American composer Kelman Duran’s stark electronic score.
Julia has unruly long hair but sports a macho arm tattoo and androgynous clothing. (”Julie, Julia and I are ‘nonbinary’ beings,” says Quivoron in a press-kit interview.) A gutsy biker who hasn’t mastered all the tricks the boys can do, she attends suburban “rodeos” where young men pop wheelies and do other stunts on ATVs and lightweight motorcycles - until the police arrive. As the only female cyclist, she’s an outsider. She even assumes the tag “Unknown,” like a lone drifter in a spaghetti Western.
What earns Julia a measure of acceptance is her skill not as a rider but as a thief. She joins a group of guys who run a motorcycle chop shop under the close but absent supervision of Domino (Sébastien Schroeder), a ringleader who’s in prison. Julia even becomes close to the big boss’s mostly sequestered wife, Ophélie (played by the film’s co-writer, Antonia Buresi), for whom the younger woman appears to feel an erotic attraction. Not all the gang members are happy to have Julia around, though, even if they’re impressed with the audacity of her plan for a major theft, a fullgang endeavor whose frantic culmination ends the story.
Quivoron previously made a short film, “Au Loin, Baltimore,” about the motorcycle rodeo subculture in the Paris suburbs, and clearly knows it well. Besotted with Japanese motorcycles and American hiphop, the working-class participants hail mostly from former and current outposts of the French empire in Africa and the Caribbean. (Julia is from Guadeloupe, a French possession near Puerto Rico.) The men who play these characters, most of them also nonprofessionals, flaunt attitudes that appear as lived-in as their logo T-shirts.
Yet nuggets of fantasy sparkle amid the grit, beginning with the film’s premise: Quivoron envisioned a female protagonist because of her experience of often being the only woman on the scene when she was filming it for “Baltimore.” “Rodeo’s” motocross action was choreographed by a professional stunt coordinator, Mathieu Lardot, with Hollywood blockbusters on his résumé. And Julia’s fate is conjured from imagination, not observation.
What ultimately happens to Julia is cinematically vivid but narratively unsatisfying. After allowing her protagonist to expand her character and show a wider range of emotions, Quivoron turns her back into a tough-guy movie archetype. “Rodeo” looks like a documentary but finally makes a reckless swerve toward the mythic.