[yasr_overall_rating]
When his daughter goes missing from their prairie town east of France, Alain and his young son, Kid, head out to find her. The journey takes the men to some far-off and unsettling places in what begins to feel like an endless quest.
French screenwriter Thomas Bidegain has quite the resume. After gaining skills with a few shorts, Bidegain achieved notoriety in 2009 with his first feature-length script, “A Prophet.” The film won the Grand Prize of the Jury in Cannes and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Feature. He went on to write the lyrical-but-flawed “Where Do We Go Now,” the heart-wrenching “Rust and Bone” with Marion Cotillard, the vastly underrated drama “Our Children,” the fashion mogul biopic “Saint Laurent,” and the sorrowful “Dheepan,” which won the Palme d’Or in Cannes last year. An enviable career, to say the least…So what the hell was he thinking when he decided to direct “Les Cowboys,” a messy, pointless thriller with a muddled political message? Put it this way – while Bidegain may be a terrific writer, he’s no Jacques Audiard when it comes to helming duties.
Bidegain’s tale opens with a U.S.A.-worshipping cowboy convention, where Alain Balland (François Damiens) sings Patti Page’s “The Tennessee Waltz” (badly) on stage to an adoring, cult-like crowd, all sporting wide-brimmed cowboy hats, American flags and denim. His wife Nicole (Agathe Dronne), and siblings Georges, a.k.a. Kid (Maxim Driessen) and Kelly (Iliana Zabeth), are among them, the latter of whom dances with her father, in a sequence that lasts way too long for its own good. We get it – they love country music, as much as each other! It runs through their freakin’ veins! Something bad is about to happen to her!
Lo and behold, Kelly disappears without a trace. Alain finds out from her friends that she’s been seeing a guy called Ahmed (Mounir Margoum) instead of attending her Tuesday swimming classes (argh, the horrors of teenagedom!). Somewhat presumptuously, Alain reprimands Ahmed’s taken-aback parents, then proceeds to pretty much dismantle Kelly’s room, piss off the local cops, and racially profile Ahmed’s family and work colleagues. We’re at minute 15 here, and I already love this guy! And how about this town? Bidegain’s version of a saloon is frequented by a Native American character, referred to derogatorily as “L’Indien” (Jean-Luis Coulloc’h), who serves no apparent purpose but to enigmatically wander in and out of the place. What IS this place, for Christ’s sake – Shyamalan’s “The Village”?
A Sherlock Holmes-like, weirdly elusive gentleman from the Ministry of the Interior asks enigmatic questions and inspects Kelly’s room, then leaves with no answers. When the Ballands gets a letter from Kelly, saying something in the vein of, “I’m fine, don’t look for me,” Alain goes all Liam Neeson, interrogating folks in impoverished neighborhoods. “I don’t give a shit,” he tells a guy serving him tea. “All that, your life, I don’t give a shit! I’m looking for my daughter.” He then nearly assaults a child in a “gypsy” camp outside town, because she’s wearing Kelly’s bandanna, and consequently gets kicked out by the “gypsies.” When he returns to get the “gypsies” (where’s Borat when you need him?) with the cops, the place is empty.
Years of worldwide searching (Yemen, Denmark, Turkey) apparently pass. Next thing we know, after a brief fade-out, Alain and the much-older Kid (Finnegan Oldfield) travel by boat to Antwerp, following a trail, which then leads them to Dangerous Syrians. Why Alain would endanger his kid is never fully explained or even hinted upon – wouldn’t it be wiser to have him stay with his mother and her new boo? ‘Cos if Alain is dragging poor Kid along out of pure envy, that’s just selfish, if you ask me.
From this point on the film gains momentum at a directly proportional rate to its preposterousness. A purportedly shocking development halfway through the film, and the consequent shifting of gears, tonally and thematically, will most likely throw you off rather than make you admire the filmmakers’ audacity. I’ll let you discover whether or not Kelly is found in Chaman, Pakistan, with the help of a mysterious “L’Américain.” By this point the film lost me, big time. It’s as if “The Vanishing” copulated with “Taken” and gave birth to a French little “Syriana.” I will, however, say that a girl named Shazhana (Ellora Torchia) comes into the picture, a portion of the film dedicated to her adjustment to this weird cowboy/French culture.
Despite being a French production, “Les Cowboys” has all-American sensibilities: blatant racism under the guise of “incisive exploration,” a Dirty Harry-like Caucasian protagonist who takes the law into his own hands and passes it on to his kid (or, should I say, Kid), unwarranted allusions to 9/11 and terrorism…François Damiens raves and shouts and offends – it’s a one-note performance that displays minimal range. Finnegan Oldfield fares better in a quieter, subtler role that manages to convey more – but not enough to save the film, or even buy it.
If it’s supposed to be a satire of the genre, it’s certainly too somber to be classified as such. If it’s a portrayal of an obsessed man gone berserk, it’s way too “been-there-done-that,” and the jarring shift in the middle of the plot doesn’t help matters. If it makes some sort of a political statement, it’s too diffuse and unintentionally (?) xenophobic to get its point across.
The film moves at a brisk pace, I’ll give it that. The filmmaking team know how to frame a shot and piece together a movie. John C. Reilly pops up briefly, providing a welcome little glimpse into how wonderful this film could have been, if it were just about his character (doesn’t that apply to every film starring John C. Reilly?). Cinematographer Arnaud Potier may depend a bit too much on blurry backgrounds, but does contrast the visual feel of a classical Western (lots of pretty prairie/forest scenery) against the “grayness of today” admirably.
That said, this attempt to transport an old-fashioned Western story into a contemporary setting is both too literal and obtuse, too straightforward and complicated – and just too strange, confused and discombobulated to function. Bidegain should stick to his day job.
Opens at the Angelika Film Center in Dallas Friday, July 22nd
