The Frenchwoman Lola Quivoron wanted to make her debut in feature film direction with the accelerator at full throttle in an adrenaline-pumping film about the vicissitudes of a young marginalized woman from the suburbs of Paris who is passionate about motorcycles. An authentic Motomami, in the style of the empowered woman that Rosalía immortalized in her third studio album. Rodeo won the prize (‘Coup de Coeur’) from the jury of the Un Certain Regard section of the 2022 Cannes Film Festival and its protagonist, also debutant Julie Ledru, won best actress at the Seville Festival.
The film, which premieres this Friday in theaters, begins with a sequence shot in which Julia (Ledru) argues with her brother in the hallways of the center where they live. She is pure fire and very nervous. She dedicates herself to stealing motorcycles when she meets with a salesman to test them out. “I was born with a motorcycle between my legs,” she says proudly.
In that complex balance between accelerator and brake, that girl with haggard eyes and curly hair screams free in a world that has turned its back on her. She soon meets a gang of acrobatics enthusiasts on wheels who at first look at her with contempt and then become partners in dealing, repairing, selling and stealing parts for a guy who is in jail. In a clandestine universe dominated by testosterone, Julia will try to find a home. Until an accident puts her position in the gang at risk.
Quivoron entered the world of urban rodeos in 2015 and does not believe it is a place closed to women, “but there are few,” she says. Her experience has nothing to do with what the story conveys, since “everything is fiction and I felt welcomed, because I was a photographer and I made several short films and I have written roles for bikers,” but it has allowed her to distance herself and create the entire mythology around the film.
He confesses that Scorsese’s Taxi Driver has served as a great inspiration for him. He recognizes that in the story there is implicit “a violence that comes from patriarchy” and that he did not want to make a documentary about motocross on asphalt, something that he is passionate about. “The film arises from a personal movement and from my meeting with Julie Ledru, which is based on a biker girl that I met one summer and who disappeared.” The director wanted to follow “the ghost” of that young woman and she found her three years before making the film in the figure of Ledru while she was searching on Instagram. “Julie called herself ‘Unknown 95’ and I loved her provocative and irreverent attitude because she would put her motorcycle inside her room and cover her face. We met and for me it was a miracle because she personified that dream I had for the character and embodied it. in his body.”
For Julie, who like Julia has also experienced social stigmas due to her origin, her gender and her skin – her family is from Guadeloupe – it was a kind of shock to talk to Lola about her role. “It couldn’t be that there was so much coincidence and connection with the character. To this day we still talk about that mystique that she created for herself,” she says with a huge smile. The film, which was made in 29 days and with a low budget, talks about breaking the rules in the patriarchal and sexist world.
Asked what tools women have to blow them up, Quivoron expresses: “To begin to blow up patriarchy, the power relationship that is established and the evaluation you make of it are important. Being a filmmaker offers you the possibility, precisely, of being responsible for create a microsociety.” She comments that on filming she does not like to be considered a director of actors. “I guide them and I like to listen to them. It was important to have a very strong desire and for this it was essential to be together and see those power relations in that microsociety. I liked to get up early and spend time with the whole team. It is true that I was not in the same place as them but I was with them and that is politics. Breaking power relations and, in a certain way, hating the place of privilege that you have received. That is a way of working patriarchy.”
And he continues: “because breaking the usual power relations is politics. In a way, to change things you have to hate the place of privilege that you have received and that is also a way of working with patriarchy, because it is the work of man.” privileged white.” He also mentions the importance of the notion of gender fluidity. “I really like the Spanish philosopher Paul B. Preciado, who in An Apartment on Urano talks about the sexual revolution and the paradigm between man-woman and invents a political and at the same time poetic regime. For me it is very inspiring. I think that by not “To define ourselves, we are free and it is important to escape from that male gaze, from male expectations, and Julia is in that line of thinking,” concludes the director, whose next feature film will be about the mafia. “It will be a gangster movie where there will be many women and some men. I want to continue in the action genre, with a lot of fire and risk.”
