Chloé Zhao is a magnificent filmmaker. In her own way she has already made history, as the first Chinese to ever direct a Marvel movie, Eternals, a group of invincible defenders of Earth created by Jack Kirby. As strange as it may sound that a super-independent filmmaker takes over a $200 million Disney project, it’s not such a bizarre idea after all. Zhao’s is somehow a cinema of superheroes struggling to defend the few things they have left.
That’s exactly what happened in her beautiful debut film, Songs my Brothers Taught Me, set in an Indian reserve in South Dakota. She did even better with her second film, The Rider, a wonderful work between fiction and neorealism that tells the story of a rodeo champion cowboy forced to leave competitions because of an accident. A modern western that portraits a new frontier, no longer a promised land, but a destination that moves further and further since there’s no longer time or space for dreams. Nomadland is another chapter in this new history of United States, a country of forgotten people left to their fate.
Preston Sturgess did the same with Sullivan that travelled across America masking as a extraordinary comedy one of the most political and dramatic works of entire American cinema. Zhao continues her cinematic journey talking about real people, using Frances McDormand to convince those who cannot stand the gaze of a world they simply ignore. The two-time Oscar winner gets in the character carrying on a tradition of American women who draw from the land and work their extraordinary strength, as Norma Rae, Edna Spalding (both Sally Field in Martin Ritt’s film and Robert Benton’s Places in the Heart), Mae Garve (the splendid Sissy Spacek in Mark Rydell’s The River). Nomadland is a western, but also a horror film in which Tom Joad’s too many ghosts, modern pioneers wandering in search of a slice of life and dignity. Both are just beautiful words written on pieces of paper that few people still know. Just like Chloé Zhao’s ghosts of Nevada.
NOMADLAND
USA, 2020, Directed by Chloé Zhao Cast Frances McDormand, David Strathairn, Linda May, Swankie Runtime 108
