El Jockey, an easily translatable title, is perhaps a marmite film. Stylish, driven as much by its art design as any real sense of narrative, Ortega constructs his movie out of striking images and Roy Andersson-esque sequences. A roomful of female jockeys cavort. A broken figure is swallowed up by a military band. A racehorse races against a Dodge driven by a gaucho. And so ond so forth There is much artistry on display and the film’s opening sequences are arresting, but as it becomes clear that the narrative is essentially a paint-by-numbers job, its charm perhaps begins to wear off. Or perhaps not. Andersson is just one reference here, but just this year I have seen films by Cocteau and Parajanov, where the visual stimuli is prioritised over narrative, or perhaps it might be truer to say that narrative has been employed as a means of transmitting image. Ortega’s film with its use of colour and cliche might be said to belong to this tradition: a feast for the eyes which uses arbitrary narrative connections to bind these images together. At times it feels like advertising: albeit advertising which promotes nothing so much as the director’s personal flair.
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