First-time feature director Lola Quivoron opens up the throttle with this biker movie set in the outskirts of Bordeaux in France, which gives us some fierce bursts of speed, real-life stunts, and quite a bit of storytelling content. It reminded me of Rachel Kushner’s 2013 novel The Flamethrowers, which also showed how very, very angry some men get when women are good at riding motorbikes.
Real-life racer Julie Ledru makes her movie acting debut as Julia – street name “Inconnu” or “Unknown” – a badass that we first see storming out of some kind of hostel and then stealing a motorbike. She has a cunning method of making an online offer for one on sale on eBay, showing up at the seller’s house and asking if she can do a solo test drive, reassuringly giving him her heavy bag to hold, supposedly full of valuable stuff like her phone and money (but actually just soil she’s scooped into it) and then taking off. Julia desperately wants to be accepted by a crowd of sexist male dirt-bike riders who do breathtakingly dangerous moves and suicidal wheelies at their illegal meets on deserted stretches of road.
But on her first day she is haunted by a catastrophe involving the only biker there who was nice to her, and the chill of this persists as she hangs out with the gang at their garage where they are theoretically employed restoring old bikes and selling them on at a profit. In fact, they are selling stolen machines, and Julie’s skills in theft and her hunger for thrills impress the gang leader Domino, who runs things from prison; Julia, meanwhile, befriends Domino’s abused partner Ophélie (played by co-writer Antonia Buresi) as well as entertaining the romantic attentions of fellow biker Kaïs (Yannis Lafki).
It’s a movie made dense and vehement with Julie’s passion for bikes and her angry sense of a death wish which is going to strike her, ahead of anyone else.
• Rodeo is released on 28 April in cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema.
