‘Rodeo’: Film Review | Cannes 2022

Sheri Linden
·7 min read

The strife and hustle of the Parisian suburbs have been portrayed onscreen before — never, though, through the eyes of a protagonist as uncategorizable as the one in Lola Quivoron’s exhilarating genre mashup. Her name is Julia, but within the brotherhood of outlawed dirt bike “rodeos” where she demands a place and gradually wins grudging respect, she uses the handle Unknown, not unlike a lone, rootless figure from a classic ronin saga or Western. Leading a strong cast composed mostly of non-pros, Julie Ledru is transfixing as the movie’s born-to-ride hero. Rodeo is a combustible fusion of crime story, character study and existential mystery, a tale of celebration and lament, and it announces the arrival of a gifted and adventurous filmmaker.

What at first feels like it might follow a familiar coming-of-age template — one about finding your tribe and making your way in the mean streets — soon reveals itself to be far less straightforward. The writer-director has spent years getting to know an underground community of wheelie-popping motorbike riders north of Paris (a milieu she explored from a gentler but no less striking vantage point in her short film Au Loin, Baltimore), and her empathetic understanding of the milieu and its denizens comes across powerfully. Her first scripted feature acknowledges the class realities constricting the young characters’ lives, but she’s at least as concerned with the idea of transcendent spirituality as she is with the day-to-day grit of survival.

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In the chaos of the opening scenes Julia’s bike has been stolen, a matter of dire urgency for her; it’s as though she’s lost a limb. Quivoron is intent on plunging the viewer into Julia’s POV and employs hyperkinetic camerawork by Raphaël Vandenbussche that’s more self-conscious than involving. It’s also unnecessary; Ledru, a biker the director discovered on Instagram, infuses the role with a with a take-no-prisoners intensity that requires no underlining. Elsewhere in the film, Vandenbussche achieves far more with restraint. Some of the film’s wordless sequences achieve ineffable depths of feeling — grief, joy, suspense — through a combination of understated lensing and Kelman Duran’s stirring score, an elegant and otherworldly distortion of reggaeton samples.

In those initial moments, Julia’s loud-and-clear desperation elicits no sympathy from her judgmental brother or the male neighbor from whom she demands a ride. “Shit sticks to you,” the latter spits out with contempt, deluded enough to believe he’s better than someone so cursed. However such ill will may have affected Julia in the past, here and now her single-minded sense of emergency leaves no time or space where it can touch her.

Onward to her next step, replacing the missing bike, a mission she embarks on with larcenous gumption and inventiveness. And not just any bike will do; she requires a serious machine. Having found one for sale on eBay, she poses as a potential buyer, impersonating a more amenable, girlie version of herself. Conventional femininity, just like polite discourse, is strictly role-play for Julia when the situation demands it. (“Julie, Julia and I are nonbinary beings,” Quivoron says in the film’s press notes.)

But Julia does express one emotional truth to the man she’s about to rip off: “I was born with a bike between my legs.” You feel for this chump, and the others who will follow. Most filmmakers would cut to the reaction of someone witnessing the theft of his expensive possession in broad daylight. What interests Quivoron is something else entirely: Julia’s exultation as she opens the throttle and races away.

To see her tearing down the road on her mechanical steed is to see someone doing what they love most in the world. Arriving at one of the gatherings where the riders show off impressive stunts, she demands what she needs to keep the dream alive: fuel. Her presumptuousness and aversion to niceties aside, most of the guys can’t even begin to process her presence. The few women who hang around the rodeo are usually doing so on decorative terms. They wait and watch by the side of the track, or maybe catch a ride on the back of the bike before its owner gets down to the business of wheelies and other solo maneuvers.

But one rider, Kaïs (Yanis Lafki), finds something admirable and amusing in Julia’s insistence that he share his gasoline. With a teasing flirtatiousness that’s self-mocking yet sincere, he asks for something in return: a smile. And she responds for all womankind: “Creepy, dude.”

Kaïs belongs to a group called the B-Mores, and another of its members is so impressed by the moxie of “Unknown” that he takes her aside to show her a few tricks of the trade. This warm welcome from Abra (Dave Nsaman) goes beyond kindness; there’s something soulful and sacred about it, something that links their fates. She’ll begin dreaming of him, and the dreams won’t be comforting, entangled as they are in a devastating event.

While most of the B-Mores roll their eyes, unsure what to make of this interloper, two in particular, Manel (Junior Correia) and Ben (Louis Sotton), turn on the full-bore hostility. Undaunted, Julia seizes the chance to sleep in the garage that serves as the group’s headquarters. For her, this is a godsend. A couple of scenes, including the havoc of the opening sequence, demonstrate how her mother’s public-housing apartment isn’t home for Julia but merely a place to stash her few possessions and clash with her brother. The garage is a clubhouse and a place of business; it’s where the riders, using swiped parts, turn cheap bikes into souped-up models to sell. Overseeing it all — from prison — and taking a cut of the profits is garage owner Domino (Sébastien Schroeder), whose iron grip and attention to detail haven’t loosened a bit just because he’s locked up.

Under his thumb more than anyone is his wife, Ophélie. Played by co-writer Antonia Buresi in a riveting turn, Ophélie has a survivor’s toughness but has fallen in line with the big man’s edicts and become a kind of prisoner herself, rarely leaving the house. As a result her son, Kylian (Cody Schroeder), who’s about 5, is restless and agitated and her nerves are shot. Intent on turning Julia’s thieving skills into a cottage industry, Domino directs Ophélie to make her over, to prettify this wild child with a presentable femme getup — in essence, a kind of drag for her performance as a respectable consumer.

Nothing so sentimental or explicit as “sharing” goes on between these two fiery women, and yet affection builds between them in ways that are undeniable, as well as ambiguous. Maybe it’s island roots that make them simpatico; Julia’s family is from Guadeloupe, Ophélie’s from Corsica. When Julia pulls Ophélie and Kylian out of their cramped apartment and out for a ride, the feelings of liberation and connection are straight from the heart.

Julia’s selflessness grows clearer as the story moves toward its stunner of a conclusion. She insists to Kaïs that she doesn’t need money, but still she secretly socks away the cash she earns. And she does so with a ritualistic focus, not unlike the sage she burns. She uses it not to purify her house, as most people do, but with a focus on her body, the vulnerable knees and elbows especially.

For all her toughness, Julia isn’t done trying to prove herself to the B-Mores. That need makes her more vulnerable than ever. It’s also the surface reason for Rodeo’s shift into heist mode. But as the ragtag group ups the law-breaking stakes and Quivoron ratchets up the tension and dread, the filmmaker delves into a realm of violence, horror and sacrifice that has nothing to do with crime. It’s the place where dreams prove true and the rubber meets the road.

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