People ride horses for all sorts of reasons, explains the jockey hero of Luis Ortega’s offbeat and stylish Argentinian crime drama. They ride to arrive at their destination more quickly, or to wage war more effectively. Mostly, he says, they ride to escape. This jockey is familiar with the nagging urge to take flight. He is a study in motion, a figure in flux. Show him a fence and he will promptly jump it – or die trying.
There is much to relish in Kill the Jockey, not least Nahuel Pérez Biscayart’s wonderfully stone-faced performance as Remo Manfredini, the rider who absolutely, positively has to win his next race in order to keep a gangster off his back. Biscayart plays Remo as though he is the soulful clown in a silent movie, Buster Keaton with a riding crop. He gives the impression of being the bemused lightning rod for events, as opposed to what he really is: an unruly, drug-fuelled rogue agent who is a danger to himself and pretty much everyone else around. “We know all about your unquenchable thirst for disaster,” says leathery Sirena (Daniel Giménez Cacho), the mob boss, in the brief moment of calm between the scene in which Remo performs a slapstick somersault at the starting gate and the moment when he gallops full-tilt at the race-track’s barricades.
When the rider leaves the track, it is the cue for the tale to follow suit, because Ortega’s film is only a high-stakes sports thriller on the surface and recognises that genre labels are just costumes to be tried on, then discarded. Now Remo has busted out of the hospital to embark on a meandering, sad-eyed odyssey around Buenos Aires. He has changed his name to Dolores, swapped his jockey ensemble for a lady’s fur coat and a turban of white bandages, and conceivably switched his gender pronouns, too.
The authorities suspect brain damage. “Because of his injury, he seems lost in space and time,” says the cop who has been tracking him via the city’s security cameras. Remo’s pregnant girlfriend Abril (Úrsula Corberó) wants him back. Sirena wants him rounded up and dealt with. And there is a teasing hint here that Remo may have been dealt with already, because when he steps on the scales inside the art-deco chemist, the needle barely moves. It is as if the city at night is a spectral limbo, a shadow world; a frontier of the senses where a body can roam free.
Ortega shot his first feature at the age of 19 and scored a small hit at Cannes with his 2018 film El Angel, so he has been moving up through the pack, starting to trouble the established favourites. Kill the Jockey competes in Venice’s main competition, where it is pitted against the likes of Maria, the Joker sequel and Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door. It won’t win, surely not. It’s too skimpy and self-conscious, more a series of gestures than an organic whole. But Ortega frames his action with a delicious high style, interspersing tense standoffs with formal dance sequences. He gives the impression that all his characters are locked in a bizarre hothouse romance, even when they are chasing or attempting to kill one another. The direction is flavoursome and distinctive; his film is a break from the norm. If the tale loses jeopardy when Remo drifts into the city, that is probably in keeping with its mercurial, skittish nature. Kill the Jockey has jumped the fence and abandoned the race. It is away in the rough, merrily doing its own thing.
• Kill the Jockey screened at the Venice film festival.
