Remo Manfredini (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) is a talented horse rider past his prime who struggles with addiction and has to win races for his employer, Sirena (Daniel Giménez Cacho), a gangster determined to get Remo sober so he can win again.
Directed by Luis Ortega and co-written with Fabian Casas and Rodolfo Palacios, El jockey is a surreal and absurdist film that could be divided into two parts, the first one where we are in the realm of the real and the second one where surreality takes over and every sense and logic is left behind.
There is a constant search for peculiarities that sometimes can border on kitsch. For instance, people that strike the eye for their appearance, doppelgangers, close-ups of horses' privates that remind us of Walerian Borowczyk, a character always carrying a baby, people dancing at random. Elements that aim at furthering the absurdist ethos of Ortega's feature.
What ails the movie is that behind all the conceptuality and surreal elements, there is never a purpose other than to enhance its whimsical nature. One could draw symmetries with "Orlando" by Virginia Woolf or with "La mala educación" by Pedro Almodóvar, where its protagonists change gender, but they are like loose structures trying to find meaning in a shapeless figure instead of a cohesive whole with meaning. Even Luis Ortega acknowledged in an interview with Urbana Play to not understand his own movie.
What the movie also shares in terms of Almodóvarian elements is a rich color palette, and this has to be one of the strongest aspects, along with the music, that render many sequences like music videos where time is still by reason of how good image and sound go together. Other than that, there is not much to see in El jockey.
