With “Kill the Jockey“The Argentine director Luis Ortega presents an exuberant and stubborn film that is largely evading classic narrative patterns. The result is an excessive, visually exciting but narratively increasingly fraying piece of cinema, which is in a striking 70s look between surreal search for identity, weird riding sports study and queer gene structure Located. Instead, he designs an episodic trip through transformation, death and rebirth-embedded in an idiosyncratic mixture of black comedy and grotesque neo-noir.
Remo Manfredini (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) is considered a rock star of horse racing. With a rigid look and almost completely wordless, it is a dazzling appearance in the Argentine half -world. Despite his relationship with his pregnant girlfriend Abril (úrsula Corberó), Remo continues to slip into a self -destructive whirlpool of alcohol, drugs and emotional estrangement. His career as a jockey also suffers from this, but it is out of the question. Remo is deep in the guilt of the gangster boss Sirena (Daniel Giménez Cacho), who gives him a last chance to repay his money with a decisive horse race. But the important event ends in the disaster and becomes the beginning of a surreal self -discovery process. An absurd odyssey full of bizarre encounters takes its course …
Remo (Nahuel Pérez BiscayArt) is no longer a bit of a horse race – but quitting is expensive for him.
Remo Manfredini, who is hardly more than a lifeless body at the beginning, is at the center of “Kill the Jockey”. In a emphasized symbolic first scene we see him sleeping, almost unconscious, as an image of inner emptiness. His life revolves around alcohol, drugs and apathetic when he is not sitting in the saddle. In the once successful jockey, an almost fatal accident starts a transformation process that completely dissolves its identity. But Ortega does not tell this change as a classic history of self-discovery, but as a surreal-charged frenzy of metaphors, ecstatic-slopes tableaus and escalating images.
Remo's newly won freedom as Dorlores is under constant threat from the demons from his criminal past and the uncanny form of the notorious Malevo Ferreyra (Jorge Prado). The former provincial police chief, which in Argentina is a symbolic figure for vigilante justice and torture in the course of the “dirty war” doctrine of the military dictatorship, makes Ortega appear as a steadily recurring dark omen of time and inevitable fate. The severity of death and persecution that waves in the background is broken through grotesque humor and absurd situation comedy.
The total excess
Already in “The Black Angel”, Ortega's fascination for stylistic devices beyond classic narrative patterns indicated. “Kill the Jockey” now takes this manuscript to the extreme. The plot becomes increasingly due to a minor matter, the figure drawing blurs in the episodic structure, in which Remo stumbles through various stations. Ortega prefers to stage moods than actions, costs performance scenes. The dance appearances already used in his predecessor film will become scoring choreographies in idiosyncratic jockey costumes that interrupt the narrative flow of the story in their video clip staging, but underline the cool mood and tension of the figures. In addition, individual attitudes are particularly successful: such as a wonderfully captured scene through a glass revolving door, which skillfully picks up the disorientation of the main character, or a subjective riding scene that puts the viewer directly into the saddle.
Ortega's cinema is one of the excess. Grille costumes, wild 70s tabloous and a soundtrack that celebrates Argentine and Spanish classics of the 60s and 70s, places Ortega into a idiosyncratic manuscript. Aesthetically, he ties in with influences of exploitation cinema, but mixes it with contemporary queerness and a certain grotesque theatrics, which makes works by Pedro Almodóvar or especially Jacques Audiard's gangster musical “Emilia Pérez”. Both films use similarly excessive aesthetics, play staging with gender fluids and present a mixture of machismo, melodrama and self -discovery elements.
With his great game, Nahuel Pérez BiscayArt still holds the narrative film together!
Ortega's figures are not psychologically deeply drawn, but rather projection surfaces for existential and social issues, above all questions of gender, desire and identity. With all the staging force, Ortega's formal freedom threatens to cover the emotional fall height of history. Linking surreal visual language and grotesque humor prevents a clear emotional bond with the strange figures. Remos wrestling for freedom and belonging is lost partly in the director's will.
What holds the film together is the outstanding performance of Nahuel Pérez Biscayart (“120 BPM”). With a minimalist game, an almost pantomimous precision and the stage presence of a rock star, he manages to embody the fragile tightrope walk between the gender identities. Especially in the ecstatic dance and performance passages, its physical presence merges with the audiovisual expressiveness of the film. His jockey is not only athlete, but also a projection surface for a wide variety of figures – from gangsters to children. In his moments of tumbling and searching, Remo is created on Charlie Chaplin's tramp figure: he appears lost, but has an almost childish curiosity about the absurd that he encounters. Like the Mafia boss Sirena, who always holds a baby in her arms that is said to have not aged for years.
Conclusion: “Kill the Jockey” is an eccentric and stylized trip of an identity and transformation process. Luis Ortega proves to be an uncompromising stylist, but between the shrill tableaus and the episodic structure, the emotional depth sometimes remains on the track. An idiosyncratic film that kidnaps his audience in Ortega's own cinematic parallel world. Always worth a look for fans of Schrämem Author's cinema.