Luis Ortega This movie was screened on Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica Kill The Jockey Comedy • 2024 • 1h 37m

Normality… the unknown.

Catapulted into a full Kaurismäkian photography, here is a showcase of extravagant faces, mutilated bodies, concave or convex, decay and corruption amidst illegal gambling and crime.

A slap in the face to a girl who might be trans, or maybe not, while Remo Manfredini sleeps with his mouth open in a bistro.

He is the most famous and glorious jockey of his generation, now consumed by drug and alcohol use. He must repay the boss Sirena, for whom he races and to whom he owes his life. Abril, his girlfriend and also a jockey, is taking his place. Filled with ketanol, the drug for racehorses, he has an accident that kills a valuable horse. Now on the verge of death, he embarks on a visually overwhelming and fascinating transformation through the streets of Buenos Aires.

The imagery is grotesque, the backdrop is Buenos Aires: “Walking in that city,” explains the director, “is a real experience, especially at night. There are many ghosts and people out of the ordinary. The film was born from a deep gaze at the city, the consciousness of innocence, of ignorance. The fact is, it's easier to write when someone is persecuting you.” In the role of Remo, Nahuel Pérez Biscayart, César Award winner for 120 Beats Per Minute, chosen by Ortega because he was “the only actor capable of reaching that suspended point”: “Luis is a magician, the only person I’ve worked with more than once, we know each other very well, we understand each other at a glance.”

Luis Ortega is considered one of the most original voices in contemporary Argentine cinema, crafting an exceptionally original film, surprising in form, overwhelming in content; a bit surreal, a bit grotesque, and never realistic.

Nothing is as it seems, except the banal and self-serving criminality that raises children, horses, and jockeys in the face of the baroque and kitsch idolatry of Catholic devotion to which they desperately cling.

Discomfort reigns in a world/miracle court where only money has value, not for those in search of and in constant disposal of their elusive identities…

Remo is one or none, everyone or no one is simultaneously a hundred thousand realities. He dances, dresses up, gets emotional, loves, wants a child from his Abril who is having sex with another.

He will return to being Remo, after embodying various forms including that of Lola: he will run fast like the wind again because no one can stop his multiple voices.

A sublime performance will not go unnoticed.

A sophisticated and overwhelming soundtrack.

Remo has a bandaged turban, wears a fur coat and a bag found upon waking: he doesn’t know exactly who he is but above all, he doesn’t know who he is not because he is always ready to become it. Identity transformation at work in a world where if identity is unknown, fluidity drowns in a sea of possibilities that are nevertheless histrionic, theatrical, caricatural where ontology gives way to extreme relativism, a privileged path to radical nihilism, playful, desperate but eccentric, recreational, and artistic.