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El Jockey

This Argentinian film (also known as Kill the Jockey) about a troubled rider in Buenos Aries, promises a lot but doesn't quite deliver. It starts like a rocket but pretty soon loses the run of itself, like a 1000m sprinter in the Melbourne Cup. I could see it fading about halfway through, but the punter can't help the jockey or the horse (or the film).

Nahuel Pérez Biscayart plays the jockey, Remo, who seems to have a death wish, for reasons only alluded to. At the beginning of the film, he's found by his gangster boss's henchmen zonked out in a bar, and then returned to the track, where he spectacularly fucks up in the barriers. His pregnant girlfriend Abril (Úrsula Corberó) is worried but also occasionally amused by his erratic behaviour.

When his boss brings over a Japanese horse for the big race, the pressure is on Remo to win, and cleanly as well. Considering he's been using horse medicine to get off, this isn't the easiest task. The race doesn't go too well and Remo is hospitalised, but not for long. He's visited by an old guy (who might be a relative, or something less prosaic), then Remo absconds from the hospital wearing a woman's coat, still sporting an unfeasibly conical head bandage.

Sounds wacky? It gets more so, and I think the director Juan Ortega has sacrificed narrative solidity for an overdose of style. There are shades of Aki Kaurismäki (the old, implacable guys watching the dance at the start, stoniest of stone faces, jarring musical choices) as well as Pedro Almodóvar (transvestism, sexual acceptance, characters working against stereotypes). Incidentally (or not), it seems Almodóvar helped produce another Ortega film, El Angel, and the cinematographer of El Jockey just happens to be Timo Salminen, regular lenser for, yes, Kaurismäki.

Performance-wise, Corberó lights up the screen, she's not on it enough, while Biscayart runs through a lot of emotions without actually being much troubled by reality, or even believability. A few of the grizzled old stagers are amusing, it often feels like an old Bertrand Blier film when they're on. The boss, Sirena (Daniel Giménez Cacho) gets around with a fat baby in his arms, like Blofeld and his white cat. It's riddled with that kind of forced zaniness.

So this is a promising young colt, with some fine breeding, it's just not quite able to get past the finishing post. El Jockey played at the Spanish Film Festival around Australia.

See also:

Biscayart is better in the excellent Persian Lessons (2020), directed by Vadim Perelman. For a vintage horse racing film, let's have a bit of the Marx Brothers in A Day at the Races (1937), directed by Sam Wood.

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