Les Cowboys (Thomas Bidegain, 2015)
Thomas Bidegain’s 2015 film Les Cowboys acts as a modern interpretation of John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), using an immigrant-populated and culturally shifting France as a backdrop, as opposed to the American West. At the center of Les Cowboys is an investigation of terrorism: Bidegain uses Islam as the “culprit,” whereas Ford used Native American culture. The film’s narrative revolves around the disappearance of a young girl who has supposedly run off with a radical Islamic sect, and the chase that ensues by her father and younger brother. Les Cowboys, in its pursuit of finding the missing girl, works as an interrogation of various cultures and how the decisions we make help to define us. The search is for an older culture; the search is for something human, the daughter/sister, but her disappearance functions as a microcosm for the volatility of culture as a whole.
The first section of the film follows Alain Balland (François Damiens), the father of the missing girl and a man fascinated by old, American cowboy culture. He functions as the first “John Wayne” of the film. Clad in a black cowboy hat, Alain spends years chasing the tiniest bits of evidence to the whereabouts of his daughter. Alain represents an older culture, both in costume and in mindset; he must be strong, resilient, believing that a firm devotion to his own morals will lead him to his daughter, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
The transition to the film’s second half comes at the expense of Alain. Years of searching have dragged him down, graying his beard, wrinkling his face, and generating an entirely bitter demeanor. Driving down the road, Alain, drunk from whiskey, sings “The Tennessee Waltz,” a song that he earlier performs to a happy crowd of family and friends before his daughter’s disappearance. The song now carries the weight of a dirge, of a time lost. The camera cuts between shots of Alain driving, the outside fog and mist, and the rows of halogen streetlamps that coat and stripe the screen in soft orange balls, hovering above Alain on his delirious drive. The scene ends with Alain’s car overturned, a small fire starting to blaze on the car’s stomach while the camera continues to track backward, leaving Alain and his vehicle in flames.
Alain’s son, Georges, also known as “The Kid” (Finnegan Oldfield), takes up the reins of the search for the remainder of the film. It is through Georges that Bidegain generates the strongest argument for a change in behavior toward different cultures. Bidegain presents Georges as an individual who has suffered from Islamic behavior (through the disappearance of his sister), but also as a witness to terrorist attacks. In one of the film’s most startling scenes, Georges walks into a French bar filled with silent spectators. On the small, mounted bar television are the startling, painfully familiar images of the smoking World Trade Center, immediately after the planes make contact on 9/11. The camera follows Georges into the crowd of people, zooming in to the images of the buildings, and finally assuming Georges’s subjective perspective. Suddenly, as the frame narrows on the television, and as one of the towers collapses, a cry comes from inside the bar. If anything, Les Cowboys raises the question (for me and for many critics and audiences) of a film’s right to show such footage from a terrorist attack.
Les Cowboys (Thomas Bidegain, 2015)
Georges’s story quickly turns into a love plot. On one of his ventures to find his sister he ends up spying on an Islamic woman, Shazhana (Ellora Torchia), whom he mistakenly takes to be his sister. After both of them are arrested, a romance slowly blossoms between them. Yet the film moves all too quickly during the formation and development of their relationship, detracting from its validity and the film overall. Weeks turn into years, and suddenly, Georges is married and has children with Shazhana. Georges seems to be the one character who overcomes the hatred and biases of his father, putting them aside to overcome cultural boundaries; yet his progressive change and open-mindedness nonetheless feel very forced, in ways that actually undermine and thwart what the film’s overarching political lesson seems to be.
Les Cowboys works to expresses change on a global level. Bidegain’s film engages with and moves beyond previously established tropes in the western genre, while also suggesting that an assimilation to and understanding of a culture comes more easily than the years spent hating it. Les Cowboys ends peacefully, with the recognition of and acceptance of Islamic culture, a happy ending that seems arguably to reduce the complexity of cultural tensions. Would that life could be tied up and resolved as easily as a film script.
Author Biography
Connor Newton is a senior English-Film Studies major at Hendrix College and a co-president of the Hendrix Film Society. Connor enjoys the films of Wes Anderson, as well as other films dealing with adolescence, such as Les quatre cents coups by François Truffaut. In the future, Connor plans on working at a brewery in Little Rock, continuing to study films and write on the side.
Mentor Biography
Kristi McKim is an Associate Professor of English and Chair of Film Studies at Hendrix College, where she was awarded the Charles S. and Lucile Esmon Shivley Odyssey Professorship, honored as the 2014-15 United Methodist Exemplary Professor, and nominated for the CASE U.S. Professors of the Year Award. Her publications include the books Love in the Time of Cinema (2011) and Cinema as Weather: Stylistic Screens and Atmospheric Change (2013), in addition to pieces in Camera Obscura, Studies in French Cinema, Senses of Cinema, Film International, The Cine-Files, and Film-Philosophy.
Department Overview
Hendrix College offers a major in English with an emphasis in Film Studies and a minor in Film Studies. This growing program within an intimate and rigorous liberal arts college environment includes a variety of courses in the history and theory of film and media, alongside co-curricular experiences (such as this trip to the New York Film Festival) generously made possible through the Hendrix-Odyssey Program. Extracurricular film-related groups include Hendrix Film Society and Hendrix Filmmakers.
Film Details
Les Cowboys (2015)
Director Thomas Bidegain
France
Runtime 114 Minutes
Follow this link to read the introduction to this set of reviews: https://www.filmmattersmagazine.com/2016/05/21/2015-new-york-film-festival-introduction/
