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‘Kill The Jockey’ Review: Argentinian Director Luis Ortega’s Strange, Surreal Gangster Comedy Will Take You For A Ride – Venice Film Festival

By Damon Wise,

1 day ago

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Produced by El Deseo, the company owned by Almodóvars Pedro and Agustin, Luis Ortega’s last film, El Angel (2018) was the gloriously kitsch, sexually mischievous, and very loosely fictionalized true story of a notorious Argentine serial killer known for his baby-faced looks and crimes so hideous that Ortega balked at portraying even half of them. Though it comes without the Almodóvar imprimatur, Kill the Jockey (just The Jockey in Spanish) is a more subdued yet somehow even stranger piece of work, starting out like a deadpan Wes Anderson spoof of a Stanley Kubrick gangster movie and slowly mutating into a genderfluid/trans version of Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin .

The jockey is Remo Manfredini (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart), a once-famous horse racer, and we find him in a catatonic state in a jaw-droppingly bizarre dive bar frequented by literally legless drinkers. Manfredini is out cold, and a gang of mobster types comes to take him. “You have to take responsibility,” they say. “You can’t disappear every two minutes.” But Manfredini is a character that’s more than just a tad unreliable; sporting Lou Reed’s hair, don’t-f*ck-with-me-shades and blank 1,000-yard-stare, he is more rock star than sportsman. We find this to be a fact when, after checking in for the race he was about to miss, he washes down a cocktail of ketamine, cigarette smoke and whisky.

Needless to say, Manfredini doesn’t make it out of the gate, causing problems for his paymaster Sirena (Daniel Giménez Cacho). The punters still flock to him, but Manfredini is not winning anymore — unlike his girlfriend Abril (Úrsula Corberó), whose run is about to be cut short by her pregnancy. The Grand Prix is coming up, and Sirena’s gang is running out of patience (“Why do you behave like an artist ?” spits one). Sirena has just paid a million dollars for a horse from Japan (it’s called Mishima, by the way, which tells you something about this film’s sensibilities), and it is vital that Manfredini wins.

More crucially, it requires him to ride sober, and after a drunken accident he is sequestered until the race. Matters are made worse by the fact that Mishima has been trained to run in the opposite direction, and, for a time, it seems that Manfredini might have actually changed his ways. The film changes gear dramatically, however, when the jockey suffers a violent concussion during the race, one that sends him to the hospital. “His injuries are not compatible with life,” the doctor politely tells Abril, but Manfredini is made of sterner stuff. After stealing a fur coat and handbag belonging to an old lady in the same ward, Manfredini silently ventures out onto the streets of Buenos Aires to find himself.

This search for his true identity takes some very surprising turns, and, as Manfredini, Biscayart is never less than committed. The world around him is hyperreal, and Ortega really digs into the superstition and rituals of horse racing. The changing rooms — for men and women alike — almost resemble fetish clubs, while their twerky warm-up routines often come with the pulsing beats of Latin electronica. There are moments of absurdity too; Sirena’s gimmick is the baby he always carries with him that — as nobody notices — never seems to age, even when it dramatically changes ethnicity.

In the last half-hour things get very busy indeed; minor subplots pile up in the manner of Labyrinth of Passion -era Almodóvar, and the unexpected truth behind Sirena and Manfredini’s relationship is revealed, pushing things to an ending that doesn’t seem to know quite where it’s going to go (or whether it will actually ever end). It’s fun, refreshing, and really quite barking mad, but, free of a true story to work from, Ortega can be a little too self-indulgent if left to his own devices (the press notes for the film come with a pretentious “director’s statement” that would make your eyes glaze over). This is not a criticism or even a bad thing, artistically, but, though it has panache and style, Kill the Jockey just needs a rather more substantial narrative to get it, and us, to the finish line.

Title: Kill the Jockey
Festival: Venice (Competition)
Sales Agent: Protagonist
Director: Luis Ortega
Screenwriters: Luis Ortega, Rodolfo Palacios, Fabián Casas
Cast: Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, Úrsula Corberó, Daniel Giménez Cacho, Mariana Di Girolamo, Daniel Fanego, Osmar Núñez, Luis Ziembrowski
Running time: 1 hr 37 mins

‘Kill The Jockey’ Review: Argentinian Director Luis Ortega’s Strange, Surreal Gangster Comedy Will Take You For A Ride – Venice Film Festival

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