And they're off

On Luis Ortega's Kill the Jockey

Near the beginning of the Argentine director Luis Ortega’s film Kill the Jockey, the dissipated jockey hero Manfredini (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) prepares for a race by opening his locker, lighting a cigarette, pouring whiskey halfway up the side of a waiting lowball glass, exhaling into the glass so the smoke sits like a roiling cloud atop the amber liquid, then downing the whole mixture, the remnants of the smoke emanating from him like the wisps of a vanishing ghost. It’s the funniest definition of a reckless hero since the ineffably cool opening of John Woo’s Hard-Boiled where we watch Chow Yun-Fat’s saxophone-playing cop prepare a tequila rapido, down it in one gulp, and then exhale a long stream of cigarette smoke (he’s inhaled before he drank). In a tough-guy action picture like the type Woo makes, those don’t-give-a-fuck moves signify the hero. It takes a lot longer to identify Manfredini as the hero of Kill the Jockey, partly because he spends much of the first half of the movie in a stone-faced stupor you might wonder why you’re watching him at all. By the end of this deadpan surrealist comedy, you know you’re watching a romantic hero.

Shortly after that introduction, we see Manfredini in the starting gate waiting for the race to begin. When the gates open his horse shoots out from under him and he falls, dead drunk and stoned, to the ground. That’s a problem for the big-shot businessman Fanego (the actor Daniel Fanego, who died of cancer in September) backing him and for his thugs whose only assignment seems to be to get Manfredini, functioning, to the track. It’s also a problem for Abril (Úrsula Corberó) Manfredini’s fellow jockey who’s carrying his child and, taking full stock of his self-depredations, determined not to bring it into this world. Lying in bed, Manfredini’s head on her stomach, she’s the hardest-nosed Madonna who has ever graced a pieta. Manfredini asks Abril what he can do to win back her love. “Die and be born again,” she tells him. Kill the Jockey is the story of how he keeps that promise.