Our resident movie buff returns to the cinema for a surreal neo-noir psychological drama that ‘pulls racing’s hoariest clichés inside out’
Kill The Jockey (2024)
directed by Luis Ortega; starring Nahuel Perez Biscayart, Ursula Corbero, Mariana Di Girólamo
It was going to happen sooner or later. The struggle to depict the realities of the horse racing world has plagued filmmakers for as long as motion pictures have been around.
There have been noble failures, embarrassing flops, and a handful of movies that have come achingly close to delivering an accurate portrayal of the sport in all its beauty and contradictions.
Then along comes the Argentine director Luis Ortega, known for his avant garde inclinations, and his intersection with horse racing at its most fundamentally absurd.
The result is the very surreal Kill the Jockey, in which Ortega and his luminous cast reach down the throat of racing’s frail anatomy and pull its hoariest cliches inside out.
Kill the Jockey made its debut at the prestigious Venice Film Festival in 2024 to a chorus of critical observation that strained the pages of any handy thesaurus.
It can be presumed they knew next to nothing about the Argentine racing scene, or horse racing at all. To Ortega’s credit, that did not matter.
‘Visceral, chaotic allure’
Wendy Ide described it as “audacious, lawless and irreverent” in Screen Daily. Carlos Aguilar, writing on rogerebert.com, thought the film had “visceral, chaotic allure”. And Gary M. Kramer, weighing in on the Gay City News, called Kill the Jockey a “bold, fabulous, and queer absurdist drama”.
It is also hilarious, meditative, and hopeful by turns, with a dramatic arc that defies convention and yet makes perfect sense.
To describe in detail the plot of such a film tends to dull its impact. Suffice to say that Remo Manfredini, played by the shape-shifting Argentine actor Nahuel Perez Biscayart, is a celebrity jockey with a sketchy past who is in the midst of both a career crisis and a psychological breakdown as the story begins.
It does not help that he has the loyalty of a fellow jockey, who is carrying their child. Neither is he comforted by his patron, a quietly threatening mob boss, nor by the ketamine and cognac cocktail he ingests before going out to ride. A jockey with a drug problem? What next?
“Being gifted is a blessing,” says Remo’s gangster patron. “What good are miracles, though, if you lose your mind along the way?”
Alarm bells should ring when Remo is given a last chance to get his act together and is booked to ride a million-dollar Japanese horse imported by the patron. The name of the horse is Mishima, complete with all its suicidal implications.
Remo goes cold turkey, tests clean, and then downs a pint of brown courage hidden in a Catholic icon just before riders up
.
Mishima is all that and a bag of chips, but then horse and jockey go off the rails – literally and figuratively – in a moment of shattering catharsis that launches Remo into a twilight zone of self-discovery.
Rattled skull
“His injuries are not compatible with life,” says a hospital official, as Remo languishes, his riding helmet wrapped in bandages as if an extension of his rattled skull.
The pronouncement hits home, because Remo himself is no longer compatible with his own life. Grabbing the fur coat and purse of a fellow patient, he sets out on a dazed wander through the streets of Buenos Aires that brings to mind the passage from Catch 22, when a traumatized Yossarian gets a stomach full of the bombed-out ruin that was Rome:
The night was filled with horrors, and he thought he knew how Christ must have felt as he walked through the world, like a psychiatrist through a ward full of nuts, like a victim through a prison full of thieves.
Remo’s odyssey through the middle section of Kill the Jockey accelerates a transformation that was predicted in an earlier exchange with Abril.
He asks: “What do I have to do for you to love me again?”
She replies: “Die and be born again.”
Sordid jockey past
And there it is. Once he is jailed for a variety of misdeeds during his wanderings, Remo becomes Dolores, nicknamed Lola, in enigmatic reference to Remo’s sordid jockey past.
Dolores is a hoot, styling the hair of fellow inmates and offering impromptu lectures on the world she once ruled: “The encounter between horse and man changed the course of history more than any other invention,” Dolores says, to the rapt attention of a prison audience that wonders why she knows.
Remo the jockey returns for a breakneck final section that goes from a ridiculous pair of match races to a sublime rebirth that is tied with a perfect bow racing fans will adore.
Ortega and his co-writers, Rodolfo Palacios and Fabian Casa, knew exactly what they were doing, inspired by the director’s encounter with a street crazy who insisted he weighed nothing. Zero.
After a visit to the races, Ortega took it from there. “So what happened to this guy that is obsessed with weighing himself?” Ortega said in an interview with film writer Christopher Reed.
“What happened to him is that he was a jockey and he fell from the horse. And so I just created that past for him. And it’s so beautiful.
“These little guys that get on that horse. They risk their life every time they get on the horse and they look so good in their costumes. And I just put those two stories together and that’s how it happened.”
Joyful pain of renewal
Biscayart’s performance as Remo-Dolores takes the breath away, leading the viewer on a journey from burnt-out case to serenely sexy and finally on to the joyful pain of renewal. Biscayart’s slight stature fits the role to perfection, and his take on jockeys in Gary Kramer’s interview is choice. “I trained two weeks before shooting,” Biscayart said.
“I got quite good, galloping and flexing on the horse and turning. But, of course, you never get up to the speed the jockeys get, 70-78 kilometres an hour. They are like adrenaline junkies. They are crazy, naughty, and mischievous.”
It is no surprise that the devotees of queer cinema have latched onto Kill the Jockey big time, although there is enough heat in certain scenes to stir the loins of any red-blooded homo sapien.
Remo and Abril kick things off with a writhing deconstruction of a Gene Kelly-Cyd Charisse dance number. Ursula Corbero, the Spanish actor who plays Abril, could light a match with a glance, while Mariana di Girolamo, as Abril’s eventual partner, does more with lowered eyelids and a back-handed tap of the whip that anyone has a right. The warm-up routine choreographed in the women’s jockey room provides its own highlight reel.
Critics have floundered around in search of directors whose work reminds them of Kill the Jockey. Wes Anderson seems to come to mind first, based on his arch precision, but Ortega is much looser and experimentally manic.
His spirit owes more to the work of Jim Jarmusch, who gives odd characters free rein, and Takeshi Kitano, the master of the droll Japanese gangster flick and the lingering reaction shots that Ortega (right) puts to delightful use.
Kill the Jockey swept most of the major awards presented in 2024 by the Argentinean Film Critics Association, including best picture, director, and actor. It was also a nominee for the Golden Lion at the Venice Festival, among an all-star field that included the Oscar winner I’m Still Here.
• Kill the Jockey ran briefly in a few North American theaters and now can be found for a rental or purchase on Amazon Prime
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