The Upcoming
  • Culture
    • Art
    • Cinema
      • Movie reviews
      • Film festivals
    • Food & Drinks
      • News & Features
      • Restaurant & bar reviews
      • Interviews & Recipes
    • Literature
    • Music
      • Live music
    • Theatre
    • Shows & On demand
  • Fashion & Lifestyle
    • Accessories
    • Beauty
    • News & Features
    • Shopping & Trends
    • Tips & How-tos
    • Fashion weeks
  • What’s On
    • Art exhibitions
    • Theatre shows
  • Tickets
  • Join us
    • Editorial unit
    • Our writers
    • Join the team
    • Join the mailing list
    • Support us
    • Contact us
  • Interviews
  • Competitions
  • Special events
    • Film festivals
      • Berlin
      • Tribeca
      • Sundance London
      • Cannes
      • Locarno
      • Venice
      • London
      • Toronto
    • Fashion weeks
      • London Fashion Week
      • New York Fashion Week
      • Milan Fashion Week
      • Paris Fashion Week
      • Haute Couture
      • London Fashion Week Men’s
  • Facebook

  • Twitter

  • Instagram

  • YouTube

  • RSS

Cannes Film Festival 2019

Bull

Cannes Film Festival 2019: Bull | Review
15 May 2019
Joseph Owen
Avatar
Joseph Owen
15 May 2019

Movie and show review

Joseph Owen

Bull

★★★★★

Special event

The rodeo is defined by competition and spectacle. Riders have a dual role: winners and entertainers. If the body doesn’t hold up, the mouth takes its place. Crowds bray for swivelling torsos and crass one-liners. Fall off the bull and pick up the microphone. Pray for your teeth once you’ve hit the floor. From cowboy to clown, the next fall is worse: from clown to corpse, from apparent choice to indefinite retirement.

Annie Silverstein’s Bull illustrates the rodeo death drive through two neighbours: 14-year-old Kris (Amber Havard), without fortune or functioning family, and 50-odd Abe (Rob Morgan), a man on the tail-end, slowly spiralling someplace, wherever painkiller and alcohol addiction leaves you. One will inevitably tutor the other. But questions of who holds authority are allowed to shift, to be rendered unclear. The course to redemption is often ambiguous when taken in tandem.

Both protagonists are defined in their origins: Kris’s mother is in a state penitentiary, bound up with a cycle of violence. Her grandmother, well-intentioned and debilitated, exists on a supply of insulin injections. Her younger sister is a further burden, willingly loved but heavy to hold, a new frontier of financial angst. They all look remarkably alike.

Abe, meanwhile, comes from riding stock: his father’s demise under the bull becomes a transferred ambition, a genetic likelihood, a socially indelible determinism. Sheila (Yolonda Ross), an ex-lover still in love, suggests this path is without virtue or value. As a person of colour in the South, Abe’s race functions at the edge of his private and professional dealings. One moment acutely shows his anger along with a realisation: that he’s a black man holding a white child, and this child is screaming.

For these characters crime and poor health constitute a state of nature and a sense of destiny. The outskirts of Houston offer a setting of relative poverty: people subsist, just about. Income is topped up through dubious means – the slippery slope of selling drugs to selling sex is foregrounded, the insidious mechanisms marked and traced throughout. There’s a suggestion that the rodeo is a righteous alternative amid the visceral fright of the relentless buckaroo.

Like many first features, Bull relies heavily on symbolism and motif to make its points: the ravaged chickens, the bulldog and the bull, a cross that’s lingered on. Gestures to metaphor are immediate, repeated and justified through earnest, serious-minded dialogue. But this remains finely made work; the viewer is invited to use different ways of looking and to be made uneasy by a relationship shot through a vexed and inconsistent hierarchy.

Chloe Zhao’s lauded The Rider detailed the push-pull of the rodeo, the lasso that tightens around the neck, beckoning and suffocating. Silverstein’s approach is perhaps too studied to yield a similarly consuming narrative, but there’s a steady, predictable flow that unpicks the processes of decay and the morally uncertain shoots of hope. To ride the bull and to dodge out of the way, the mind slows things down even as the body deteriorates.

★★★★★

Joseph Owen

Bull does not have a UK release date yet.

Read more reviews from our Cannes Film Festival 2019 coverage here.

For further information about the event visit the Cannes Film Festival website here.

Related Itemsreview

More in Cannes

The Traitor (Il traditore)

★★★★★
Joseph Owen
Read More

The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily (La fameuse invasion des ours en Sicile)

★★★★★
Joseph Owen
Read More

Adam

★★★★★
Joseph Owen
Read More

Frankie

★★★★★
Joseph Owen
Read More

Cannes 2019: Awards, predictions and highlights from the festival

The editorial unit
Read More

Sibyl

★★★★★
Sam Gray
Read More

“We’ve had to face some interesting moments of prejudice”: Bacurau directors Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles discuss their mysterious Western at Cannes 2019

Sam Gray
Read More

“If I play a smaller role, nobody will ever forget it”: Bacurau star Udo Kier recounts his long and varied career at Cannes 2019

Sam Gray
Read More

To Live to Sing (Huo Zhe Chang Zhe)

★★★★★
Mary-Catherine Harvey
Read More
Scroll for more
Tap

Movie and show review

Joseph Owen

Bull

★★★★★

Special event

  • Popular

  • Latest

  • TOP PICKS

  • Female filmmakers lead nominees for the London Critics’ Circle Film Awards
    Cinema
  • Jeremiah Fraites – Piano Piano
    ★★★★★
    Album review
  • Persian Lessons
    ★★★★★
    Cinema
  • We Still Fax at ANTS Theatre Online
    ★★★★★
    Theatre
  • Lonely the Brave – The Hope List
    ★★★★★
    Album review
  • Identifying Features
    ★★★★★
    Cinema
  • 23 Walks
    ★★★★★
    Cinema
  • Live Lab at The Yard Theatre: An interview with associate director Cheryl Gallagher
    Theatre
  • We Still Fax at ANTS Theatre Online
    ★★★★★
    Theatre
  • We Ask These Questions of Everybody: An interview with Amble Skuse and Toria Banks
    Theatre
  • Identifying Features
    ★★★★★
    Cinema
  • We Still Fax at ANTS Theatre Online
    ★★★★★
    Theatre
  • WandaVision: Marvel’s charming sitcom proves an astounding success
    ★★★★★
    Cinema
  • The Queen’s Gambit: A chess story that’s not about the moves but the motives
    ★★★★★
    Cinema
  • Undercover at Morpheus Show Online
    ★★★★★
    Theatre
The Upcoming
Pages
  • Contact us
  • Join mailing list
  • Join us
  • Our London food map
  • Our writers
  • Support us
  • What, when, why

Copyright © 2011-2020 FL Media

Jim Jarmusch, Selina Gomez and Tilda Swinton talk gender imbalance and the role of teenagers in our society at The Dead Don’t Die press conference in Cannes
John Carpenter in conversation: From no-budget filmmaker to horror maestro