THE STORY – A group of fearless cowgirls compete at riding wild broncos on the rodeo circuit after nearly a century of being excluded because of their gender.
THE CAST – N/A
THE TEAM – Taimi Arvidson (Director)
THE RUNNING TIME – 104 Minutes
Eight seconds, counting down by 100ths of a second. Each moment faster than a blink. All you need to do to get through, to survive the pounding of hooves and bucking of the back, is to last those micro moments. Hang on, ride the wave, take the beating, maintain the balance. You can hold your breath for eight seconds. Yet in that briefest of times, when your steed is literally trying to rip you off its shoulders, when the audience is cheering and the adrenaline is rushing and the muscles are aching and the blood in your ears is pumping, eight seconds can feel like a lifetime. Taimi Arvidson’s “Cheyenne” dives into the world of female bronco riders, a group of women who are helping to resuscitate a tradition that has been closed off for more than a century. At famed rodeo events throughout the US, the tradition was always for cowboys and cowgirls to share the stage, but after an injury to one particularly prominent participant spooked the organizers, it became a men’s only event. On one level the film is a simple and straightforward sports doc, following a committed group of individuals as they seek a spot to compete for the world championship of bucking bronco riding. It’s handsomely shot by Nic Midwig, and the dusty palate and sun-dappled drone shots evoke the iconography of any classic Western.
We witness broken bones and backs, tears backstage (but never on the field), and the amazing tenacity of a group of young women who voluntarily put themselves in a position where success warrants a belt buckle, and failure could literally lead to a fatality. One could easily scoff at such a pastime, finding the gladiatorial style showcase tasteless or even cruel, a vicarious way for patrons to half want things to go well, half wanting to witness the truly cataclysmic. Yet the film is far deeper than this sporting spectacle, and the travails of many of these women are far harder to buck than the horses that they ride. Abuse, be it sexual, physical or otherwise, is discussed unabashedly, and several of them refer to those moments atop their horse as their most purified form of escape from all their quotidian baggage, a space where the intensity of competition erases all the doubts and internal pain focuses both mind and body on the task at hand.
With some “Ted Lasso“-like coaching parables from those helping these athletes achieve their dreams, it’s easy to connect with cinematic underdog stories ranging from such beloved films as “Bad News Bears” and “A League of Their Own”, through to the underwhelming 1994 Luke Perry drama “8 Seconds” that still somehow simmers within the collective consciousness. With large text placement naming our protagonists (“Bee”, “Brooke”, and so on), as well as an incessant and unnecessary countdown to the big competition, there’s an attempt to inject even more interest to the non-bucking bits. Little is done to actually explain the scoring system beyond the octo segmentum temporis of it all. Meanwhile, even the most casual search to find out illustrates the gendered language that even the rules evoke. Yet during these rounds leading to Cheyenne, the same things apply to women and men alike, with one of the frontrunners in fact regularly competing in mixed gender events to great success.
So why, then, have an alternative category segregated away? The film touches upon this element, but doesn’t really spend much time, save for the inclusion of a few misogynistic archival clips diving into the divide overtly. Despite the many systemic reasons that women have been barred from the sport over the last century, there’s other, more nuanced complications regarding the way the competition is fostered and newcomers are guided through the ranks. It’s these more subtle moments, be they deeply personal or more generalist in scope, that elevate the film into something far more engaging and probing than a mere excuse to watch in slow motion a bunch of women on writhing beasts. Thanks to sympathetic characters, a keen camera eye, and sympathetic direction, the story of the road of these riders to Chyenne is both capable and compelling. This is a film that will speak to many that have never sat atop a horse, let alone one intent on ridding rider from their backs, and it’s this core storytelling element that makes Arvidson’s film so powerful.
