The Mustang – The woman whispering in the horses’s ear

The french actress Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre was noticed at Sundance in 2014 with her short film Rabbit. Obtaining a writing scholarship and the opportunity to participate in the numerous workshops organized by the American Independent Film Festival to develop his first feature film.

The Mustang where we find prison and animals, elements that were already mentioned in Rabbit. Here, a violent and mutinous inmate joins a rehabilitation program through the training of wild horses. This scenario mixing prison film and western tradition could only seduce the great manitou of Sundance. Robert Redford (prison director in Brubaker, trainer in The Horse Whisperer) is the executive producer of this film.

A strong and bitter film that explores with virtuosity the opposition between prison confinement and the open spaces of the American West. Matthias Schoenaerts (Bullhead, Rust and Bone, Red Sparrow…) lends his imposing build, but also his fragility, to the main character while Bruce Dern (who plays the cowboys in the last three Tarantino) plays the head trainer who tries to train him. Paradoxically, The Mustang scenario sometimes evokes teenage fictions about learning autonomy through a relationship with a horse. But is it a flaw where an additional proof of the originality of this film straddling several genres ? The director tells us about it in the Malibu stud farm where Luc resides, one of the horses that shot in the film and that became her own.