Review: Bitterbrush (2022)

From TV shows like Yellowstone (2018 –) to its spin-off series 1883 (2021 –) to high-profile celebrity moves to Wyoming (hi, Kardashians), media inundates us with a curated version of the American West. This is not a new phenomenon – the western has long been a revisionist tale, one that cast aside any narrative that wasn’t that of the heterosexual white male cowboy. But beyond multi-million-dollar ranches and the popularity of western apparel brand Kemo Sabe in glitzy ski towns across the country, there’s another way to tell a story about the West. Emelie Maldahvian’s documentary Bitterbrush (2022) places two tough horsewomen, Colie Moline and Hollyn Patterson, at the center of hers. 

If you’re going to spend a summer range riding in the remote mountains of Idaho, these two’d make good company. The film shifts from poetic to playful in tone as eye-melting landscapes are overlaid with either renditions of Bach or Colie and Hollyn’s chatty banter. Their conversations, too, make this leap: in one moment Colie pokes fun at Hollyn for her deep love of canned corn beef cash, scenes later, she shares painful memories of her mother’s death. This raw double character study instills not only a deep love of the land in the viewer but an understanding of these women as they see themselves and each other.

 

Mahdavian weaves a caring, meditative narrative through these vignette-like moments, making for a film as unglamorous as it is beautiful, placing long histories of women in the West in a modern context.