‘Kill the Jockey’ Review: A Colourful Argentine Oddity That Refuses to Stay on Track
To be a jockey is to be both athlete and adjunct. While the horse gets the glory, its human partner is a literal hanger-on: ostensibly in control, but subject to animal impulses. That paradox allows Remo Manfredini, the star rider at the center of “Kill the Jockey,” more scope for invisibility than most top-of-their-game sportsmen — though when an accident in a crucial race lands him in hospital, his very identity begins to disintegrate. Restlessly switching lanes from frenzied farce to pulpy gangster movie to gender-confusion musing, Argentine director Luis Ortega’s alternately dark and daffy eighth feature is suitably untethered for a story concerned with the malleability of the self. That comes at some cost to its impact, however: Awash with kooky gags and bolstered by the strange, soulful presence of leading man Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, it’s fun but flighty, liable to throw some viewers from the saddle.
Ortega has been steadily making films since his 2002 debut “Black Box” hit the festival circuit when he was just 21 — though his last feature, 2018’s Cannes-selected, Pedro Almodóvar-produced thriller “El Angel,” raised his profile considerably. Premiering in Competition at Venice, “Kill the Jockey” continues that upward progress: The film is novel enough, lively enough and funny enough to turn the heads of global arthouse buyers, with or without a jury prize. Even minus Almodóvar’s direct involvement this time, the influence of the Spaniard’s manic, sensually charged early work is clear, while the distinctive contribution of Aki Kaurism?ki’s regular DP Timo Salminen is another stylistic tell: There are shades here of the Finnish veteran’s droll, deadpan absurdism, albeit tempered with a streak of Latin melodrama.
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A woozy, semi-surreal opening scene sets the tone, as the camera idly browses through assorted misfits and miscreants at a grimy Buenos Aires bar, disrupted by the arrival of several heavies wielding riding crops. Finally we land on their target: Remo (Pérez Biscayart), who’s been heavily day-drinking instead of preparing for his imminent race. Hauled off to the racetrack by these derby mafiosi, he nonetheless refuses to sober up, sneaking shots of whisky and horse tranquilizer; when the race begins, the zonked jockey doesn’t make it out of the starting gate. This, it turns out, has been standard behavior of late from the onetime champion, whose spiraling alcoholism is beginning to endanger both his career and his relationship with glamorous fellow jockey Abril (Ursula Corberó), currently pregnant with his child.
Remo isn’t especially troubled by any of this: “What good are morals and sensibility if you lose your mind along the way?” he asks, clearly some way into the mind-losing process. Racing boss and ganglord Sirena (Daniel Gimenez Cacho) also isn’t much into morals, but is less inclined to let his prize rider self-destruct — not least since Remo still owes him substantial debts. Forced substance testing gets him nominally back on track, so to speak, but just as he’s in the winning stretch of a particularly high-stakes race, nature wildly intervenes: His horse runs for the fences and into traffic, sending him to hospital with seemingly terminal injuries.
Such a synopsis already makes “Kill the Jockey” sound more straightforwardly plotty than it is, leaving out as it does various gonzo diversions and hazy interludes: a delicious dance number in contrasting op-art racing silks, or languid locker-room sequences of jockeys flexing and stretching, wittily shot with the kind of libidinous gaze that has rarely been granted to these compact bodies in the annals of sports cinema. But the film takes an even more curious, slippery turn in its second half, as Remo improbably wakes from his coma not quite himself: Taking another patient’s fur coat and handbag, he leaves the hospital and roams the streets, unsure of who he is or was.
As Sirena’s henchmen set out on a manhunt, a new identity finds Remo first, though not all at once: What begins as some intuitive experimentation with makeup progresses, in the logically irrational manner of a dream, into a complete regendering from the outside in. Passing children identify Remo as their mother; a new name is assumed without comment, as if it had never been anything else. Even on these new terms, Remo’s identity keeps shifting and tweaking itself. If “Kill the Jockey” is intended as a trans allegory, it’s a vague one, though it does playfully reflect on the multitude of selves that can be housed in one body, either in turn or at once, by natural evolution or by specific design. Viewers in search of a statement are at the wrong movie; Ortega holds up a splintered mirror to a fragmented human experience, inviting us to see what we will, if anything at all.
It’s Pérez Biscayart’s wiry physicality and comically haunted, faintly spacy air that anchors the film’s more nebulous ideas, bringing some pathos to the mad-libs randomness of Ortega’s storytelling. There’s something of Buster Keaton to the actor’s doleful, offhand body language that, coupled with his escalatingly lurid makeup and ludicrously domed head bandage, suggests a skeleton slightly separated from its soul. Switching between exaggerated sporty silhouettes and thrift-store dishevelment, Beatriz Di Benedetto’s superb costume design assists Remo’s ongoing transformation, while Salminen, working with his signature high-contrast lighting, treats the character in literally painterly fashion: as if constantly sitting for a portrait, settling on an outward image. Inside, nothing is still, and nothing is settled — champing at the bit with agitated comic energy, “Kill the Jockey” suggests we’re better off that way.
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