Original title: The rider · Chloé Zhao · USA · 2017 · Script: Chloé Zhao · Performers: Brady Jandreau, Tim Jandreau, Catr Clifford…
Original title: Madame Hyde · Serge Bozon · France · 2017 · Script: Serge Bozon · Performers: Isabelle Huppert, Jose Garcia, Romain Duris…
In one of the first sequences of The rider, a group of young boys are gathered around a bonfire, at dusk. Despite not reaching the age of twenty and from what they say, They are all experienced rodeo riders.. In the heat of the fire, under the stars, The boys give an account of the multiple accidents they have suffered throughout their already long professional careers. Proud of their exploits, The strong complicity of camaraderie is perceived among them.. But as the conversation progresses, We begin to see that this story has nothing heroic about it.. The profession of rodeo rider involves great danger that, in many cases, ends up mutilating them in a physically and psychologically traumatic way. In everyone's memory is the memory of his friend Lane, a brave rider with a great future, now tied to a wheelchair, victim of paralysis that affects a good part of his body.
Dawn. Brady wakes up in his room in the modest trailer where he lives with his father and little sister.. Brady has a huge head injury, result of a fall in a rodeo in which he was riding a wild horse. After overcoming a coma, Doctors recommend that he not ride again, but he resigns himself to following the advice. He doesn't know how to do anything else. Besides, in the harsh space of the interior of the United States, An uneducated man of Indian descent has few opportunities to make a future for himself. Brady will have to assess to what extent it is worth putting his life in danger.
The second feature film by Chinese director Chloé Zhao is one of those works that you can't put too many problems into and, however, they fail to reach that degree of emotional intensity that the base material from which they start required. The doubts are confined to the structure of a script that, although he attests to his intentions, does not manage to transfer that inner energy that bubbles and that is sensed under the drama (real) what he has in his hands. In The rider his approach to the world of cowboys is so structurally calculated that, on the way, part of that spontaneity that the interpreters offer is lost (most of them non-professional actors representing themselves) and that he has not known how to squeeze. Also in the formal part, Zhao's film leaves a certain dissatisfaction. Everything is too controlled here; your staging is correct, but so iron that, except some sequence (what we will comment), fails to convey the necessary correlation between life and what we see on the screen. I don't want to say that this is always the case., but let's say, for short, that the sum of the whole leaves a somewhat lukewarm impression, no ups and downs, beautiful at times, but visually predictable, monotonous. Zhao handles really painful situations. However, fails to convey to us that impression it seeks to convey.
And it's a shame because The riderIt has very interesting aspects that should not be ignored.. Chloé Zhao subjects one of the last American myths to an exhaustive process of deconstruction. On a first level, Zhao comes to destroy that epic image of man in a piece so typical of the genre. Distinguishing it from the legend, takes the conflict to a more earthly level, that of ordinary people. And what he finds is a world where men feel bound by severe and very demanding codes of conduct.. This is the drama that Brady suffers, its protagonist, that of overcoming these group cohesion mechanisms, of the friends who, although when they are at the peak of their powers it puts them at the top of the social scale, when those physical abilities disappear (and on top of that in a traumatic way) they are separated. It is interesting (and this is not free) the role that advertising and the media play in this case, dedicated to transmitting that myth into which young people fall. It is the culture of a success that is not always achieved and whose price can be, are frequency, too high.
The other level at which Chloé Zhao's film works is that of the landscape. Landscape, first, physical. How far away the great general plans of a John Ford are here. Zhao closes the shot on his characters and what remains in the background is an arid and hostile terrain. There is nothing epic or beautiful about this set., metaphor for the decay of that other landscape, the social, also reduced to a degraded environment in which, as we said, there are few opportunities. Brady and his friends find themselves trapped in a tragic spiral.. The boys enter the world of rodeos as an escape from the precariousness to which their socio-economic environment pushes them.. At the same time, It will be the system itself that returns them to the well from which they thought they were escaping.. If the myth of the cowboy is that of the frontier, that of open spaces to conquer, Here we see a man confined in a closed territory, policy, socially and culturally. There are only two options: rodeos or a degrading, low-paying job at the corner supermarket.
But Chloé Zhao is aware of the complexity of the topic she is addressing.. Despite what we have been saying, not everything is a response to a predetermined situation. There's something else that pushes Brady and his friends to do what they're doing.: their sincere love for horses and the freedom that comes from a job that unites them to that rugged land that surrounds them. That is the big resignation that Brady faces. And there Zhao offers us the best moments of his film. It's a shame that he doesn't emphasize it with more emotional force and sometimes lets his message get lost among so many cohabiting ideas.. So, we discover that that open space is not outside, but inside Brady and his friends. There arises the union between man and animal, galloping against the wind, libre, at sunset.
I admit that I am unaware of the work of the French director Serge Bozon, but after seeing his last tape, Madame Hyde, I have promised to try to remedy this lack. Starring the incomparable Isabelle Huppert, Bozon's latest production tells us about the vicissitudes that Madame Gégui goes through, a shy science teacher from a high school in a slum neighborhood on the outskirts of Paris. Madame Gégui endures the harassment her students subject her to, those who cannot be attracted to the path of knowledge. One day, in the middle of a storm, suffers an accident. Lightning strikes the module in which he has his laboratory, reaching for her. After the incident, Madame Gégui undergoes a transformation and a new, more confident woman is reborn from the sweet and naive professor.. Madame Gégui has transformed into Madame Hyde.
For a while now, the situation of public education is being visited by cinema to the point of almost becoming a genre in itself. From The Class, of Laurent Cantet, or the most recent Girlhood, by Celine Shama, the cinema of our northern neighbors is committed to the classroom environment as another space for reflection on social imbalances. But where the aforementioned works approached the issue from a dramatic perspective, realistic, understanding, almost complacent (at least with one of the parties involved, the student body) Bozon, and this is the news, He does it from an ironic point of view, which allows you to be more incisive.
Your criticism is devastating. Con Madame Hyde, Serge Bozon dismantles any romantic vision that may exist about French public education: a dead system that does not know how to deal with a marginalized youth who are not interested in anything that is taught there. A youth that lives only in the present, from day to day, as demonstrated by the lyrics of the rap songs that the boys compose. The relationship between students and teachers is broken. Government bureaucracy contributes to this disaster, that offers no more answers than supposed educational theories that are useless and leave the teacher abandoned., solely responsible for the success or failure of the system. In these conditions, so as not to go crazy (although this is not certain that it will not happen), the only way out is to swim with the current, as does the director of the center where Madame Gégui teaches classes.
Without a doubt, one of the assets that Bozon has to compose this entire painting is humor.. We are not here dealing with what is understood as a typical comedy.. We are talking about a subtle humor that pulsates in the construction of the characters and the situations that it proposes and that allows the director to take his approaches towards a space that is as extravagant as possible.. Curiously, facing the search for a supposed realism, typical of other productions, the starting point, almost surreal, of Bozon, instead of pushing him away, brings him closer in an almost impudent way to that truth that he tries to reveal. As he has stated in an interview, Bozón bases many of the situations it shows on real experiences of teachers.. The drama does not arise, well, of the tragedy of each moment, but from the very absurdity of a disjointed system against which there is no other position than to take a satirical distance. Having established those premises, that feeling of acid lightness that, in this way, the director imposes, allows you to take the viewer as far as you want, giving the film a truly commendable sense of freedom.
On this path, It is worth highlighting the work of a distribution in a state of grace. Talk about the acting qualities of the actress Isabelle Huppert, for being obvious, It almost sounds like clumsy profanation. Away from her dramatic roles, Huppert realizes here his immense versatility and his absolute command of the tempo of the scene.. And the same can be said of the actor Romain Duris in his role as the quirky director of the institute where our protagonist works., Madame Gégui. Or José García in the role of her impassive husband. Pathetic. Delicious.
In a deadly double pirouette, Bozon plays, besides, with some of the fantastic elements as a way to take the viewer down unexpected paths. Taking as a starting point the myth of Jekill and Hyde from Stevenson's novel, the director makes a free adaptation, without stylistic or plot ties. It is possible that this freedom in the approach of some sequences leaves part of the audience disoriented.. But Bozon has not wanted to explain all the possible meanings that his work proposes.. Somehow, however, we understand its final meaning, that of some characters, We said, lost in the maelstrom of an unstructured society that despises knowledge. Don't miss it. GERARDO LEON
