LES COWBOYS – Review

Review by Stephen Tronicek

A 16-year-old girl goes missing, well not missing, just she goes to live the life that she wants to live, and her father overreacts and spends his every waking hour trying to catch her. Midway through, that story ends and the girl’s brother continues the search to find her. LES COWBOYS is split between these stories and each can be ripped apart on a conceptual level.

So, starting with the father. The film wishes the audience to think that this is a tough man who is only desperately trying to find his daughter, but the performance seems to take away any sense of desperation. Francois Damiens is overacting completely, and the disturbing subtext that is hidden under the surface here seems to create tonal dissonance. On that subtext. The fetishization of the Wild West displayed at the beginning of the film seems to suggest the idea that the mindset here is outdated. The extreme patriarchal fetishization that comes with the father’s hunt is disturbing and off-putting and only serves to spoil the film’s ability to effect. Damiens seems like a determined actor too, as he adds a level of detail to the performance that is unprecedented. You get the sense from just the film’s opening moments that this is a man of unparalleled depths. From the simple singing of a song you get the idea that when he’s happy he’s only pretending to be, and that’s unflinchingly realistic. Too bad that these details only serve to make the character seem almost depressingly, and wrong-headedly patriarchal. In a movie like Prisoners, that type of characterization worked because that movie was attempting to be a mind-bending, ridiculous potboiler and offered commentary on that. Here it only ruins the sincere drama that the film is going for.

The second part of the film doesn’t fare any better. This part of the film almost seems to squeeze false drama out of ideology in a way that seems blatantly offensive to both specific groups of people, and the audience. It’s disturbing, and odd but not in the way the film wants it to be. Finnegan Oldfield tries to give the brother any type of personality but fails in the face of the racial profiling and uncomfortable themes of the piece.

LES COWBOYS on the surface is a fine idea for a film but directed and acted this way the movie achieves a hateful tone that seems to leave the film a shell of what it could have been. Yes, it is notable that the actors are trying really hard to make something out of this movie, but they can’t do anything to save it.

1.5 of 5 stars

LES COWBOYS opens in St. Louis July 1st exclusively at Landmark’s Plaza Frontenac Theater