RODEO – Review by Jennifer Merin
Rodeo is French director Lola Quivoron’s compelling feature about a tough teenage girl’s hard knocks life and her intense struggle for validation and a sense of belonging.
Julia (beautifully portrayed by Julie Ledru) is a disenfranchised refugee kid who lives a feral life in rural France. She is obsessed with motorbikes and finds her only joy in riding them. She knows just about everything there is to know about them. She’s good at fixing them. She’s good at stealing them, too. And, thievery proves to be the skill that earns her longed-for acceptance into the bad boy — boys only — motorbike gang that rules the roads.
Gang membership puts her in danger. She’s brutally bullied by chauvinistic gang members who object to her presence, resent her superior skills and try to sabotage her rapid rise in rank within the gang’s hierarchy.
Julia quickly discovers that gang membership doesn’t provide the safe and accepting environment she expected. She is not allowed to come and go as she pleases. Her movements are monitored by the gang’s much feared leader, who dictates day-to-day doings from a jail cell. Julia is mandated to be a conduit between the gang leader and his closely-watched wife, a terrified woman with whom she sympathizes. They become genuine friends, confiding in and supporting each other in defying the severe restrictions placed upon them.
The police are a constant threat to Julia, too — more intensely so when Julia leads gang members on a lucrative but risky robbery.
Rodeo is an enthralling character-driven thriller. The narrative follows Julia’s unrelenting determination to be somebody, even if that somebody is female “thug.” The narrative is infused with details that suggest how Julia got to be who she is and how she figures out where she wants to go. Lola Quivoron takes a tough, confrontational theme and turns it into an emotion-grabbing character study of a young woman who, against all odds, uses her wits to triumph.
