When David Lynch tragically passed away earlier this year, he left behind an unassailable body of work, which has been often imitated yet seldom replicated. So wide-reaching was his influence that the term “Lynchian” has become commonplace moviespeak, affixed to anything that melds the surreal with the mundane, the outré with the normal, the sinister with the everyday, and typically operating on its own, vaguely-defined sense of dream logic. But the reason why most of these films fail is that the surrealism in Lynch’s work was never arbitrary. “Life is filled with abstractions,” he’d say. “And the only way we make heads or tails of it is through intuition. Intuition is seeing the solution — seeing it, knowing it. It’s emotion and intellect going together.” All this to say that Kill the Jockey, the new film by Luis Ortega (El Angel), falls on the wrong side of Lynchian, tackling the little-seen world of mafia-operated horse racing while chasing abstractions until blue in the face. The bones of a more compelling film can be discerned in the final product, but Ortega ultimately indulges in too many random oddities for the attempt to be suitably enjoyable or meaningful, resulting in a film that grows increasingly tedious the longer it drags on.
The titular jockey in question is Remo Manfredini (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart), once a star racer of Buenos Aires, now a washed-up has-been who drowns his sorrows in vices — usually in the form of a freshly-poured cocktail consisting of whiskey, horse tranquilizer, and cigarette smoke. The jockey lives under the employ of Sirena (Daniel Giménez Cacho), a fearsome mobster who races his prized horses for a living, at least when he’s not busy breeding successors for his criminal empire. Also working for Sirena is Abril (Úrsula Corberó), Remo’s girlfriend and soon-to-be mother of his child, but their relationship has clearly fallen off a cliff, with Abril so disappointed with the man Remo has devolved into that she won’t even honor his request for a golden shower in the bedroom. When a loaded-up Remo partakes in a crucial race — against all medical advice — it all goes horribly wrong, resulting in the death of a prized stallion and a head injury for the jockey. While recuperating in the hospital, Remo escapes out into the world, undertaking an odyssey of identity while Sirena puts out a hit on the man who cost him a fortune.
Kill the Jockey announces its proclivity for oddity right in the opening scene, as a pair of Sirena’s enforcers enter a bar to collect Remo, who has fallen into a drunken stupor alongside the other bar patrons, who include a man with no arms and no legs playing a harmonica, and another man sitting catatonic, a sign draped around his chest indicating that he’s had a stroke. Certainly, images like these could be found in a Lynch film, but Ortega’s raison d’être appears to be “just ‘cause!” Nevertheless, Kill the Jockey’s first act is its strongest, navigating the behind-the-scenes world of the jockey as they participate in their many rituals prior to a race, whether it be dancing or frantically vomiting up lunch to make weight. For Remo, this was once his greatest passion, but he has now fallen from grace, and there’s the question of starting a family with Abril, who, of late, has her eye trained on yet another jockey. And for all its issues, Kill the Jockey is an aesthetic object to behold, beautifully shot and boasting a soundtrack that offers plenty of propulsive, electronic needle drops that keep the proceedings moving at a nice clip.
Remo’s accident occurs at the film’s 30-minute mark, and at this point, the narrative grinds to a halt. Donning makeup, a fur coat, and a comically large headwrap as a turban, Remo embarks on his own quest of self-discovery, living life as a woman while interrogating his own self-destructive tendencies. This journey should operate as the heart of the narrative, but Ortega — who co-wrote the feature with two other writers — feels completely lost at sea, unable to put any meaningful drive into Remo’s actions, which underlines how haphazard the film’s oneiric qualities are. Part of the issue is that Kill the Jockey is really just not all that funny, despite offering a plethora of moments clearly intended to play as deadpan humor, many of which simply fall flat. There’s also the matter of an enigmatic cowboy character who keeps popping up throughout Remo’s crusade in fits and spurts, which only reinforces the Lynch connection and exacerbates the gulf in quality (“You will see me two more times if you do good,” etc.). Kill the Jockey could have been a potent exploration of the self and resurrection, but Ortega keeps getting in his own way, arbitrarily wielding surrealism with such abandon that the whole enterprise falls apart under its own eccentric bloat.
DIRECTOR: Luis Ortega; CAST: Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, Úrsula Corberó, Daniel Giménez Cacho, Mariana Di Girólamo; DISTRIBUTOR: Music Box Films; IN THEATERS: July 2; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 36 min.
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