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TLDR:

While still with cliches Ride Above rose above my expectations. It's solid well rounded horse flick with grounded drama, beautiful shots, and awesome racing. Definitely in my top 10 for horse racing movies and and instant recommendation to any fan of horses.

Long Review:

On paper I had relatively low expectations for this. I was expecting it to be sappy and predictable but in my endless quest to find good horse racing movies a french one about trotting is a subject i've yet to see. Helped that I got my first taste of french trotting this summer at Hippodrome d'Enghien-Soisy and had a ball.

So how did it turn out? Well the film is definitely a bit predictable and climactic final race is definitely the corniest it gets but it really isn't as schmaltzy as I thought it would be.

Plot

Zoe is a young girl who grows up on a horse farm run by her parents. It runs through major stages in her life from birth to when she turns 18 years old and the hardships that come with it both to the farms financial success and her struggles to deal with being a paraplegic following a traumatic horse accident.

Execution

What I really like about the story here is that while it has plot points we have seen before in other equine stories like troubled young people, rehabilitation, and a farm going through financial strife it's execution feels different. It plays it super straight with small bits of humor but it's never juvenile. The background music is calm and melodic usually keeping everything supremely grounded. Despite the film being fiction it feels like a true story minus the final race which i'll forgive.

Cinematography

While the films sound story telling was the final thing thing that gradually won me over what instantly made me realize I was gonna enjoy this was the cinematography. You get plenty of horses running on beaches weather its trotters or wild Camargues. It's so simple and effectively beautiful. The horse racing scenes are also wicked good with great lighting a great close look at these durable racehorses trotting. The sheer difficulty of filming horse races can be a great challenge in movies. After seeing so many choppy horse races where you feel like you're only getting a glimpse of the action from the stands it's great to see one with such a modern edge that makes feel right in the horse race.

Their are plenty of horse races shown on screen which can be risky if you don't add enough to make the races feel different but you get many great settings. Humble training tracks, wide open sunny tracks on the coast, or a grandiose epic stadium snowing in the dead of winter. It keeps doing new things and lighting is just top tier. Showing the blazing dusky sun on a beach to the miserable cold of a winter night. It's a very pretty movie along with being well structured.

A dramatic and beautiful French-Canadian film about hope, determination, perseverance and overcoming, based on a novel, simple and efficient, that afternoon session to pass the time, watch with the family during the holidays, and entertain the children, beautiful and cute little horses, a painful teenage drama... Cute, cute, sweet and simple...

A teenager is raised with horses in her parents' racing stable and has a deep and exceptional bond with young horses. An accident threatens to end their career, but they fight together to achieve victory. Growing up among horses at her parents' stud farm, Zoé dreams of becoming a jockey and forms a deep bond with a young horse. A terrible accident threatens to end their racing careers, but they fight to reach victory together.

While it happily avoids current Hollywood story formula, this astonishing film is well served by the Withdrawal-Devastation-Return structure that it inherits from Mediterranean oral epic. Yet it was not the film's durable structure that mesmerized me and the rest of its first American audience Friday night at the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival. What astonished me was the extraordinary moral depth of this achingly beautiful story and world from Writer/Director Christian Duguay. His film is emotionally riveting from the first scene to the last.

The movie is well grounded in the quintessential motive of cinematic, horse-themed stories: emotional honesty as the basis for meaningful relationships, despite, in the last scenes of the film, some surprising chicanery that illustrates the value of those goods internal to an activity or calling over those that are external to any one life or practice, like money and fame. The film makes us believe in and care about its characters, and ultimately, and entirely in its subtext, the film does something even more extraordinary: it exhibits and extolls the virtues themselves. The story itself retains all the uncertainties of our contingent, vulnerable existence, but the implicit argument of the story is emotionally compelling and inexorable. Ride Above is a charming, heartbreaking, beautiful exercise of a viewer's own imagination and sympathies. This reviewer feels he became, somehow, a little better as a human being for having seen it.