Review of 'On Swift Horses': Jacob Elordi in a psychedrama of the 1950s

What looks at first sight to be its standard postwar love triangle, composed of oil and water brothers and a cautious housewife, is revealed as a multifaceted crystal of lust and longing in the romantic melodrama “in fast horses.”

Unpackeding the apprehensions and opportunities of Boom Time America, as established in Shannon Pufahl's novel in 2019, director Daniel Minahan Gamely plant a foot in the Douglas Sirak's territory while looking at the direction of Todd Haynes. But just when the fascinating disorder of the central characters achieves maximum interest, you realize that the sincere commercial brightness of this film will never become a denser and dark poetry. It is an attractive film about sublimated lives and the need to free themselves, one that feels divided between presenting the charm of the surface of those desires in a repressive moment and exploring anything deeper.

However, for an hour, he has pop and pulling a soap opera of the middle of the century that benefits from the frankness with R. Sophocked Muriel (Daisy Edgar-Jones) agrees to marry her boyfriend, Lee (Will Poulter), back of a period in the Korean War, and uprooting her Kansas lives to do so sunny, brilliant and brilliant and in expansion of the south of California. The Cardsharp of Lee of a brother, Julius (Jacob Elordi), was destined to be part of that dream movement, but the call of the game takes Julius to Las Vegas.

What for Lee is the disappointment of the garden variety for not having a family around is, in Muriel, a more intangible sexual absence that cannot articulate beyond an interest in the appeal of risk. A well underestimated anxiety in the representation of Edgar-Jones transmits its new life in the suburbs of San Diego. It is good to hide cigarettes, Muriel begins to lie about his communication with Julius, while keeping his earnings from racing bets (acting in advice heard in his diner's work).

Meanwhile, Julius becomes an observer of cards for a casino as an act of atonement for its forms of thieves: it is easy to buy Elordi's version on the dishonest sensitivity of the 50 Julius cautious and cynical life is at risk of breaking with a consumer passion. (Metaphors alert: Henry, the search for emotions, drag Julius to the desert to see bomb tests). The latent attractions in Muriel are also tested separately, by the openly strange and politician neighboring Sandra (Sasha Calle), who, knowing her for the first time, extends a dwar palm, testing her first olive, she can spit the well. Someone's secret list is about to be longer.

The script full of Bryce Kass incidents keeps Minahan busy, but the twin narratives and their dangers at the moment of instant finally overwhelm the restlessness that makes the first half of “in fast horses” so palpably cheerful within all the designs of period production and the crunchy cinematography of Luc Montpellier. Minahan, a television veteran, finally falls into the episodic management trap, to the point that the characters lose their individuality within the growing dependence on the history of constructions, gestures and points.

The performance is a saving grace, especially Edgar-Jones's commitment to nuances and reads refreshingly shaded, whose depth of consciousness at a critical moment is a credible surprise, beautifully managed by the actor. Only Elordi, treated for various faces such as Beefcake and Brooder, seems lost when trying to square Julius' early vulnerability with the hopeful romance of the final act. Its great outcome is destined to be a catharsis for a deliberately corrective portion of emotional history. But, on the other hand, it feels like an easy escape hatch when they promised “in the fast horses” it was a richer psychological landscape about what is close to hearts accustomed to hiding.