Gina Gammell and Riley Keough (also actress, notably in Mad Max: Fury Road or Under The Silver Lake to name but a few): a duo of women with War Pony, the Golden Camera of the Cannes Festival past. On the occasion of its release in physical format, back on this small American independent cinema jewel...
The American Drier
Bill, 23. Matho, 12. Something in common? Their membership in the Oglala Lakota Amerindian tribe, living in the Pine Ridge reserve at the bottom of South Dakota. And the drier in which they find themselves dumped. He follows a choral narrative in which he chases the life of these two young men. The first tries to make ends meet with small jobs, sails between her sentimental galleys and dreams as a dog breeder after adopting a poodle called Beast. The second wanders with his friends, fleeing the family home eaten by crack, before discovering how much the drug can actually be paid.
Film by coming of age, in good French, where the dead skin of childhood rips out too easily to give way to a naked being in a world of squid. Bill like Matho hangs out in these empty, flat streets where the dogs can't wait to see their masters' mouths come up again, stupid with the fumes of an artificial paradise that is known to be inaccessible.
Independent film
Independent film, of course. What would Hollywood do in a film showing the rottenness of everything that was generated by the American dream? Movie broke, probably. Some rare effects are felt, even if what strikes first ahead War Pony This is the plastic beauty of his photograph, the mastery of his camera movements and the skillful composition of his frames. A visual splendour magnified by the CinemaScope format that we adopt War Pony, which embraces the horizontal planes between steppic plains interminable and Shotgun houses blushing Barbarus.
A landscape where sometimes points to a reminiscence of the cultural roots of their past as American natives. A buffalo, dreamed, popping up like a ghost in the middle of the street or in front of a window whipped by a rough snow, which only they seem to see before it evaporates again, drowned by the rot brought in the wake of white man: drugs, consumption, prostitution, etc.
Liberal surprise?
At one point, the film outlines a future that is all drawn from self-made man to the American for Bill, saved by the labor he finds, whom he imposes and which he respects. Saved by silver and white man! What to transform War Pony In the wet dream of a liberal? Those who spread in TV shows to rent those who succeed from nothing (and their famous batonage « If we want, we can »), as if the anomaly was the norm... And this television celebration of the atomized individual, detached from all determinism, as fantasized by neo-liberalism can thus serve as a surety to the powerful (here, white man, owner, resident off the reserve) to enjoy their own orgies of money... A script turn that freezes blood, that even erases! But it is without counting on the duo of directors who negotiate it to better send their character into the wall. Here, no salvation, neither on the silver side, nor on the white man side!
And the music is there, mystical, made of pinched strings and percussion, announcing from the outset the color: the trap has activated, the jaws close, no matter the hope that sometimes whispers from the planes, the fall will only be more bursting. If one could blame the film for a climax unfortunately parasitized by a song too identified (Come and get your love, of Redbone), the rest of the film is carried by this original score well felt and skillfully pioched pieces, such as Death Threats Nevad Brave to listen to below.
Anyway, War Pony is a real dive into the daily life of her two characters, from which one seems groggy to have shared two hours of their daily life. An antithetical film, as soft as it is violent, magnified by the chiseling of its writing... A real beautiful surprise of independent cinema, to (re)discover now in physical format.
Data sheet
DVD Zone B (France)
Publisher: Blaq Out
Duration: 111 min
Release Date: September 19, 2023
Video format : 576p/25 - 2.35
Soundtrack : English Dolby Digital 5.1 (and 2.0)
Subtitles French
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