When “On Swift Horses” played as a secret screening at the Palm Springs Film Festival in January, at least half a dozen people walked out, not because it’s bad, but because a certain contingent of the normally open-minded art-house audience hadn’t signed up for a gay love story. For that reason, it feels like the opposite of a spoiler — something between a consumer service and a selling point — to address what the festival capsules only coyly imply, using phrases like “self-discovery” (Toronto) and “exploring a love she never dreamed possible” (SXSW).
Adapted from the well-regarded novel by Shannon Pufahl, director Daniel Minahan’s period drama explores the challenges of coming out in the 1950s, as two characters attracted not to one another — as those deliberately deceptive plot synopses would have you think — but to members of their own genders. Knowing that allows you to focus not on the clumsy sexual tension suggested between Julius (Jacob Elordi) and his soon-to-be-sister-in-law Muriel (Daisy Edgar-Jones), but the kinship these misfit souls discover amid a more clandestine era.
Granted, there’s a fleeting chemistry between these two characters when Julius, fresh back from the Korean War, shows up at the door of his older brother Lee (Will Poulter). Muriel first notices him shirtless, stretched out on the hood of his brother’s car, like he’s posing for some kind of Bruce Weber photo shoot (later, seeing him sprawled on the bed of a Reno hotel room, you’d swear Minahan and DP Luc Montpellier were shooting a Calvin Klein commercial, not an edgy Killer Films production).
Julius is one of those omnisexual studs who turns heads anywhere he goes, but striking as Elordi looks, he’s out of his depth emotionally here. Edgar-Jones gives a more nuanced performance, conveying the reticence Muriel feels when Lee proposes marriage and little by little revealing how she emerges into a surer sense of her own desires — not only sexual, but as an independent woman at a time when social norms steered single ladies toward the altar.
During the few days they spend together, Muriel and Julius make a connection that she fully expects him to honor when she and Lee — who’s the sturdy, dependable type — do get married. Lee may be destined for disappointment, but Poulter gives the man dimension (the way Anne Hathaway did her character in “Brokeback Mountain”). With the distinctive features of a character actor and a tall blond pompadour, Poulter looks the most like he belongs to the era in question. Lee genuinely loves Muriel and has taken every step with the understanding that they were forging a path together, when in fact he’s been pressuring her to follow his dreams, as when he asks her to sell the family property so they can buy a new home in San Diego.
The plan was for Julius to follow them there, so all three could start a new life together. But the only thing predictable about Julius is that he will always disappoint — and sure enough, he gets sidetracked en route, finding work in a Reno casino instead. That’s where the title in this tidy, too often artificial-feeling drama comes in: In addition to the submerged homoerotic desires that Muriel and Julius are wrestling with, what they really have in common is a taste for gambling. Is it the prospect of striking it rich that appeals, or the risk of getting caught and having everything pulled out from under them? Probably both, but neither can resist a good wager.
Muriel seems to be the luckier of the two, judging by her success at the horse track (really, she’s just paying attention to her customers at the diner and putting their tips to work). But to the extent that Pufahl and screenwriter Bryce Kass believe in luck, it should be judged by more than just the easy come, easy go money that flows through their hands. There’s also the illicit loves they experience, as each meets someone special enough to jeopardize the lives they’ve built for themselves — and that’s the biggest gamble of them all, trusting a forbidden feeling enough to pursue it, when society outlaws it.
For Muriel, the temptation comes quite unexpectedly, when she stops to buy olives at a neighboring farm and is instantly smitten by the Latina woman who comes to the door. Sandra (an excellent Sasha Calle) doesn’t identify herself as a lesbian — at this point, that notion seems entirely foreign to Muriel’s life experience anyway — but standing on the porch, extending an open palm for this stranger to spit an olive pit into, she’s someone people of either gender could easily become infatuated with.
Meanwhile, in Reno, Julius meets someone who makes him want to settle down. But Henry (Diego Calva) is even wilder and more untamable than Julius. As a Mexican in 1950s California, he’s been mistreated for so long, he more focused on beating the system than starting a meaningful relationship with Julius. There’s a current of tragedy running beneath all of the couples here, as the characters create obstacles to their own happiness. It can feel a bit diagrammatic at times, as if the novelist were setting up impossible loves and then watching them fail. But there’s hope too, and however contrived the last scene may feel, there’s poetry in watching someone betting his future on yet another horse.
