Nothing screams “the big screen” more than a horse galloping into the sunset, a fact which wasn’t lost on John Ford and Howard Hawks who first created the western genre (described by André Bazin as the American film par excellence), which was later continued by Walsh, Mann and Boetticher, before being reinvented by Don Siegel and Sergio Leone. In recent films, horses are therapeutic; they serve to combat anxiety through the notions of freedom and exquisite beauty they represent. Scrolling through the film titles listed on streamers, we find an abundance of movies along the lines of Dream Horse [+lee también:
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ficha de la película], Horse Girl, Ride Like a Girl, Black Beauty and The Rider. With Brado [+lee también:
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ficha de la película], Kim Rossi Stuart’s third effort as a director and protagonist - distributed in Italian cinemas as of 20 October by Vision Distribution – sees him taming the western genre as if a skittish horse, much like the one in the film: he soothes it, shouts at it, is unseated by it and breaks his bones on it. He chews it, only to be chewed up and spat out. He moulds it in his image. It’s the antithesis of The Horse Whisperer: he shouts and rails. He’s not a sentimental Robert Redford but a brusque and unfriendly Pale Rider.

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Half-way through the film, Kim Rossi Stuart explains his character’s identification with the antiheroes of postmodern American frontier cinema: “Let me introduce you to the poor man’s Clint Eastwood”, is how he’s presented to the rich owner of the riding stables (a cameo role played by Carlo Degli Esposti, who has produced all of the director’s films). We’re in a rural zone of central-northern Italy, where Renato (Rossi Stuart) has withdrawn to live on a ranch inherited from his father. The title “Brado” refers to the name of the ranch and it’s an adjective [“wild”] which accurately reflects the protagonist’s nature. Having fallen from a frisky horse whilst attempting to train it for cross-country racing, Renato is nursing a fracture or two which prevent him from riding. His barely-twenty-year-old son Tommaso (who shares the same name as the protagonist in Rossi Stuart’s previous film, played here by Saul Nanni) joins him on the ranch, despite not having had any contact with his father for some years.

Tommaso reluctantly agrees to break in the horse in his father’s place, and this impassioned commitment brings him closer to the hardened parent who gave him a happy and unbridled childhood, replete with nocturnal horse riding, before Renato’s destructive relationship with Tommaso’s mother (Barbora Bobulova) stopped him from being a good father. The obstacles along the road travelled by the horse are the same, metaphorically, as those which need to be overcome by the two men on the road to reconciliation - reconciliation both with themselves and with each other. Young Tommaso also needs to break free from a toxic love (Alma Noce), for a healthier alternative is homing into view (newcomer Viola Sofia Betti).

The film’s screenplay – written by the director in league with Massimo Gaudioso, Matteo Garrone’s long-time expert collaborator – is based on a tale which appears in Kim Rossi Stuart’s 2019 literary debut Le guarigioni. For the present film, Rossi Stuart has asked director of photography Matteo Cocco to achieve a crepuscular western film aesthetic, offering up a handful of striking exterior night-time sequences, while subjecting his body, as an actor, to a state of gradual abandon and decay, to the point of resembling Mantenga’s dead Christ, and all to the tune of acoustic guitar and violin-based music by seasoned composer Andrea Guerra. After Tommaso [+lee también:
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entrevista: Kim Rossi Stuart
ficha de la película], Kim Rossi Stuart’s latest film confirms an existential vein which undermines toxic masculinity and human relations, and which results in an unaccommodating kind of cinema, which couldn’t be described as pacifying but is nonetheless cautiously spiritual, especially in the case of this third film (his recent rapprochement with Christianity is common knowledge). In short, it’s a real exception in the contemporary Italian filmscape.

Brado is produced by Palomar in collaboration with Vision Distribution, Sky and Prime Video.