Having closed the Venice Film Festival’s 41st International Critics’ Week to great success, and releasing today in Italian cinemas courtesy of I Wonder Pictures, Rider - an audacious cinematic experiment written and directed by Roan Johnson and Davide Pavanello, aka Dade – is the result of two worlds coming together - cinema and music – and looks to superimpose these two spheres to the point of indistinction, in order to portray a version of Milan riven by social divides.

(L'article continue plus bas - Inf. publicitaire)

In its very first minutes, Rider immediately sets out its intentions through a surreal and highly symbolic image: a young rider traversing the Milanese outskirts astride a white horse. Moments later, a bicycle brings him back to reality. The rider’s name is Sami (Lorenzo Aloi) and on New Year’s Eve he’s cutting across nocturnal Milan bathed in light from neons and shop windows, delivering food as the city prepares to celebrate. On his final delivery of the night, he ends up at the villa of Giorgio Colombo (Mattia Mor), a wealthy entrepreneur who has ordered sushi for his many guests and who, amidst lines of cocaine and ostentatious luxury, invites Sami to stay for the midnight toast. It’s here that the young man meets Nia (Kaze), an architecture student who dreams of becoming an interior designer. The pair’s backgrounds are worlds apart, but their attraction is immediate. A glimmer of hope opens up for Sami, but within forty-eight hours an abrupt decision will suck him into a spiral with irreversible consequences.

The story of Rider is a simple, almost archetypal one of love, downfall and the possibility of redemption, set against a divided Milan, where the protagonist’s movements seem to delineate the physical distance between the outskirts and the city’s privileged neighbourhoods. Sami pedals between these two universes, delivering food to the rich while looking for a way out of his situation, in a city where the luxury of one side seems to feed the frustration of the other. The narrative unfolds through a distinctly contemporary formal approach. The music doesn’t just comment on the images nor does it interrupt the storytelling; instead, it enters the very fabric of the story, opening windows onto the characters’ inner lives and accompanying events as they unfold, while the dialogue, which often rhymes and is already endowed with its own musicality, seems to slip naturally into song.

The point of view steadily broadens, starting with Sami and the world of riders who turn the film’s other characters into a kind of contemporary chorus. A cast uniting the worlds of film and Italian music shores up this approach. Appearing alongside Lorenzo Aloi and Kaze are rappers Ensi, Johnny Marsiglia and Axos, pop star Rosa Chemical, singer-songwriter Levante and actress/director/singer-songwriter Margherita Vicario (the multi-award-winning score for her directorial effort Gloria! was co-composed by Dade himself), as well as English actress Kyshan Wilson, and Claudio Santamaria as Sami’s father, who’s burdened by a past full of mistakes. Each of their voices adds to the story, helping to construct this narrative universe.

As such, rap and pop become the language of a generation who are grappling with precarity, class differences, a desire for recognition and frustration. The result is a youthful, fresh and metropolitan film which exudes an undercurrent of unease beneath its energetic images and thumping soundtrack; because the real theme in Rider isn’t just the possibility of changing one’s life, but how every choice can carry an exceedingly high price, especially for those with less margin for error.

Rider was produced by Movimenti Production, Red Joint and Emotion Network with Rai Cinema, with the participation of HBO Max. The soundtrack was produced by Metatron/INRI and the film is distributed by Universal.