Who knew John Ford could help explain the vicissitudes of the global conflict between Islamists and the West?
French writer Thomas Bidegain ("A Prophet," "Rust and Bone," "Dheepan") does just that with his stunning directorial debut, "Les Cowboys," a tense, utterly absorbing, and heartrending reworking of Ford's 1956 masterpiece "The Searchers."
Bidegain takes Ford's tale _ about a years-long quest by an aging Texan (John Wayne) to find his young niece after she's kidnapped by a Comanche chief _ and ingeniously retrofits it to serve as a powerful, complex parable about relations between Europeans and Arabs.
Epic in scope, covering more than a dozen years from 1994 into the 2010s, "Les Cowboys" succeeds because it explores its themes through a deeply intimate story about the travails of a single family.
The drama opens at a country-western fair in rural France, where local amateur singer Alain (Francois Damiens) is wowing the audience with a soulful rendition of "The Tennessee Waltz."
A father of two who seems to have an ideal relationship with his family, Alain is plunged into the terrifying unknown when his 16-year-old daughter, Kelly (Iliana Zabeth), runs away with her militant Islamist beau, Ahmed (Mounir Margoum).
Damiens projects an almost rabid intensity as a man totally unwilling to accept that his daughter could want a different life. Like one of his western heroes, the Stetson-wearing Alain tears around half of Europe and a good chunk of the Middle East in a desperate bid to find his girl.
Bidegain's pacing is odd and a bit confusing. He covers nearly eight years in the first 30 minutes, then changes the tempo when the search is taken up by Alain's son Georges (Finnegan Oldfield).
But this is when the film really comes into its own. While his father nursed a raging hatred of Muslims, Georges is a gentler, more tolerant, more introspective man who finds beauty in a culture his dad despised. He enters post-Sept. 11 Pakistan as an aid worker, then teams up with a sleazy American arms dealer (John C. Reilly) who abandons him after a messy shooting incident.
An unforgettable, revelatory psychological thriller, "Les Cowboys" somehow manages to end with a suggestion of hope, if not redemption.
