Lean on Pete Directed by Andrew Haigh
Lean on Pete
Directed by Andrew Haigh
Starring: Chloë Sevigny, Charlie Plummer, Travis Fimmel, Steve Buscemi
Year: 2017
Country: UK
Author Review: Roberto Matteucci
"Stealing from a waitress is just miserable."
The training trip along the roads of the United States is a classic of literature.
During the journey towards a new life, people are forced to face rites of passage, meetings, adventures, mishaps.
The on the road genre does not need a particular location, but the great American countryside certainly has a wonderful charm: the eyes lost towards the infinite, the long roads well paved, but empty and dark, illuminated by the lonely headlights of cars or anthropomorphic trucks.
Lean on Pete by director Andrew Haigh, presented at the 74th Venice Film Festival, narrates us about the path of Charley, a blond teenage boy, in the company of a horse. Their goal is a normal life.
To the beginning Charley, a young boy with a sad face, appears inside a room, it is a neglected house. Charlie is a good boy, more mature in comparison his age. He makes the daily gesture of throwing rubbish into the bin. Then, he is running to keep fit himself, the camera films him with the tracking shot from side and back.
The boy lives alone with his father, they are clearly in bad economic and sentimental conditions. They have a good relationship and mutual affection; they talk, they joke in full shot between the door and the wall.
We ignore the job of his father, but we know that it is immature and foolish. Charley is mature in spite of his young age, a role forced by necessity.
In the evening everything looks even sadder and melancholy, eating alone sitting on the couch: full shot and an isolated small light as to symbolize the abandonment of the boy.
The difficult family situation pushes him to work with a cynical horse breeder, a man able only to repeat banal wisecracks and above all to help his horses with some drugs.
Charley is always looking for love, they try to talk with him, but the answer is: "I do not have time to teach you everything."
So Charley feels well just with Lean on Pete, the beautiful horse that the breeder brings to the races. In a world where adults are distant and cold, the only possible relationship is with Lean on Pete.
Lean on Pete is as Charley, he must be abandoned, killed. Charley understands the similarity and assumes the burden of saving him, of helping him. He steals him and flees with Lean on Pete in a deep and difficult journey.
They meet the meanness of the world, the loneliness of feelings, the difficulties of life and the wickedness of people: "You can not get fond to a horse." In reality, he can because the only love is with Lean on Pete.
The journey continues to the cathartic conclusion.
The film becomes an intense drama; the boy's misadventures give no hope for the future. Everything around is transformed into a drama. The author mixes situations and explains it in an interview: "What the environment around us does to our soul ... is indescribable. The landscape in Lean on Pete perfectly expresses Charlie's emotional state. I have always been very careful to the environment that surrounds the characters of my work: I think very often just a correct cut, a right position to frame the mood at best. The American hinterland has a fundamental part in this: a huge space, full of metropolitan cities, but connected by roads that can take you in an hour to the desolate desert". (1)
The drama has an emphasis thanks to the provincial landscape, Charley has an emotion to share because his isolation is similar to the night road, empty, without anyone, solitary and where space is infinite, depopulated.
Charley, the horse Lean on Pete and the void have a spiritual union.
It is the metaphor deduced of the director through a language formed by a classical structure, linear, and a simple editing.
He searches the immensity with a wide shot taken in the environment field with always something or someone - a tree, a person - to create depth.
There is a refined photography, with dim and unique lights while the sound of horses' hooves helps to understand Lean on Pete.
Charlie is not the only one to be desperate. He met many types of people, other categories of families. Those who fought in war and live solitary with memories that they can not forget. The families of alcoholics so unconscious to steal the little money of the boy, even knowing his tribulations.
In the escape, Charlie asked for help in the horse, but the trips are difficult for both humans and animals, equally victims of rascal owners and depressed teenagers.
"In Charlie I saw essentially a little boy who tries in every way to be ... normal (one could say: to become a real child!). He wants nothing more than all the things a kid his age should have: stability, friends, family, a home, or even just a football game with the high school team. And instead he is an isolated boy, far from everyone, who desperately struggles to find someone not only to love him, but to whom he can love. " Take me home, country roads! (2)
All travellers actually dream of returning home and being a normal person with a banal life.
