Cannes Review: Lola Quivoron’s ‘Rodeo’
19.05.2022 - 15:03
/ deadline.com
Rodeo, Lola Quivoron’s vibrant and impressively funky fiction debut, ambitiously attempts to put a lot of heart into a gang movie that mutates quietly and organically into a heist thriller but doesn’t know quite how to fuse these strands into a satisfying finale. Though it promises all the elements of a cult crossover, and comes tantalizingly close to delivering, the Un Certain Regard title’s destination is most likely the festival circuit, where it will certainly stand out as a very different kind of rites-of-passage movie.
Newcomer Julie Ledru stars as Julia, who lives on and off in social housing with her brother and mother. Julia’s relationship with her mother is fraught and on the brink of collapsing altogether; she has a job, but her attendance is sketchy. The only thing that she is passionate about is motocross, and since it’s a hobby she can’t afford, she poses as a buyer on Craigslist-style websites and hoodwinks the owners into letting her take a test drive.
It is with one such stolen bike on her hands that she enters the underground world of “urban rodeo” -— a balletic form of stunt riding involving motocross and quad bikes, usually of dubious provenance -— where outsiders are suspected and shunned, as Julia finds when she tries to ride with the B-More gang. The riders turn on her until she finds a friendly face in the form of respected elder Abra, but word of an imminent police raid causes chaos, and Abra is seriously injured in the confusion that follows.
Picked up by Kais (Yanis Lafki), Julia is granted cautious admission to the gang’s clubhouse/garage, an illicit chop shop where bikes are resprayed and given new license plates. Not everyone else is so welcoming there, least of all the openly hostile Manel
The website popstar.one is an aggregator of news from open sources. The source is indicated at the beginning and at the end of the announcement. You can
send a complaint on the news if you find it unreliable.