One of the standout scenes in The Rider, the excellent second feature from writer-director Chloé Zhao, is an extended encounter between its taciturn cowboy hero and an even more taciturn horse.
Brady Blackburn (Brady Jandreau) is a young rodeo star living in a trailer on a South Dakota reservation. A bad head injury has forced him to take time off from the sport he loves. During this period of involuntary retirement, which looks to be more permanent than Blackburn would like to admit, he visits a ranch owned by a friend. The friend has a horse which needs taming and Blackburn takes on the job.
So, stepping into a small corral, Brady sets about placating this snorting, jumpy beast. Over several mesmerising minutes we watch Brady, his manner at once gentle and assertive, calm the horse down, from galloping around the cowboy in small, angry circles to the triumphant moment when it finally consents to have Blackburn mount it.
The process, observed by Zhao’s camera through a gap in the fence nearby, is untouched by any sense of fakery, and it should come as no surprise that Brady is himself a genuine rodeo star with a lifetime of experience of working with horses.
The Rider is a remarkable alchemy of documentary and fiction. Zhao’s superb cast draw on their real-life experience, playing, to varying degrees, versions of themselves (including his father and young sister, a teenager with learning difficulties). Working with a small crew, the young Chinese-born director has harnessed this real-life material into a poetic, gorgeously realised parable of loss and recovery against a backdrop of the American midwest at its most majestic.