El Jockey

Ursula Corbero and Nahuel Perez Biscayart          

Luis Ortega's El Jockey, released in the US as Kill the Jockey, is amiable light entertainment. Ortega is only 45, but the Argentinian writer and director has built up an impressive filmography over the last two decades. El Jockey wears its influences lightly: dashes of color and queer sensibility (Almodovar), deadpan surrealism (Kaurismäki), and comic zaniness (Jerry Lewis). Nahuel Pérez Biscayart is the lead, a hapless jockey named Remo who is under the thumb of a small time crime boss. He has a pregnant girlfriend, a fellow jockey named Abril (Úrsula Corberó), a tip of the gaucho to Victoria I suppose. Remo has a bad crash at the track and ends up at the hospital suffering from some whacky form of amnesia. He escapes the hospital, for no apparent reason, wearing a stolen mink coat and little else. While he wanders amongst the homeless and dispossessed of Buenos Aires, Abril finds consolation in the arms of another jockey, the sassy Ana (Mariana di Girolamo).

The dramatic contrivances that take up the last act are paper thin, but Ortega's visual imagination never flags. El Jockey boasts 2025's best sight gags. The colors in this flick really pop thanks to Ortega and cinematographer Timo Salminen, a longtime collaborator of Aki Kaurismäki. Both leads are superb, Biscayart does a great deadpan and Corberó smolders impressively. The dance numbers are a hoot and are a great showcase for the players. The music is outstanding, both the Argentine pop songs, old and new, and the score by Sune Wagner, of the Danish band The Raveonettes. El Jockey is not the type of movie that will change the course of film history, but it provides more entertainment than some of those that do. Currently streaming on MUBI.

Dracula

Radu Jude and f(r)iend

Sometimes an artist becomes so successful that they are written blank checks to pursue whatever folly fancies them. Griffith followed The Birth of a Nation with Intolerance, both a riposte to his critics and an expansion of an already overly epic vision. Spielberg followed the one two punch of Jaw and Close Encounters... with 1941, a film that reeks of Hollywood excess. Those who have seen Apocalypse Now Redux will know how close Coppola came to creating an unwatchable fiasco. In the publishing world, it seems that Stephen King and JK Rowling reached a point in their careers in which their popularity prevented helpful input from their editors. Radu Jude seemed to be reaching this point on his last film and has crossed the Rubicon of self-indulgence with Dracula. 

It is not that there aren't any interesting ideas in the film, Dracula is teeming with ideas. There are riffs on past representations of Dracula on film and in literature. There is much rumination on the traumas of Romanian history, Jude's primary preoccupation thus far. There are endless digressions in the post modern style.There is purposefully cheesy AI generated CGI. There is an unreliable narrator. There is a burlesque of vampiric cosplay. There is much lowbrow humor and more phalluses on display than in a locker room. Some of the ideas are good and some fall flat. I laughed more times than when I watched Spaceballs, but Mel Brooks knew enough to keep his farces succinct. Dracula runs almost three hours and never coheres. It is divided into fifteen parts and I would have jettisoned or severely pruned half of them.

If I found Dracula to be Jude's worst film, I still somewhat enjoyed it, but, then, I prefer 1941 to Close Encounters. Like 1941, Dracula has the virtue of an antic and lunatic vision despite its indulgent excess. Life seems to be imitating art in that a theme park called Dracula Land is opening in Romania in 2027. One thing that buoys me is that the player who gives the best performance in Dracula, Eszter Tompa, stars in Jude's upcoming film, Kontinental '25, which opens in the US on March 27th. 

Apart From You

            Mitsuko Yoshikawa and Sumiko Mizukubo                

Mikio Naruse's Apart from You is the best of the silent melodramas he directed in the early 1930s. The plot of this 1933 flick concerns aging geisha Kikue (Mitsuko Yoshikawa) and her disapproving teenage son Yoshio (Akio Isono). The sullen Yoshio is skipping school and slipping into juvenile delinquency. The possibility of redemption is embodied in Terugiku (Sumiko Yoshikawa), a younger colleague of Kikue who has known, and pined for, Yoshio since childhood. Terugiku tries to steer Yoshio to the straight and narrow, but is hampered by a toxic home life. Does Yoshio return to school? Does Terugiku succumb to the lecherous advances of an older man or does true love prevail in the end? I'll never tell, but Apart from You's ambivalent ending moved me.

The film is superior to other Naruse film of this period partly because there is no child on hand to be run over in the next to last reels, as in Flunky, Work Hard! and No Blood Relation. Apart from such melodramatic contrivances, Apart from You benefits from some directorial restraint. Naruse was fond of dollying in and out from his players to add punctuation. In some of his features from this period, he employs this technique so much that I felt seasick, but Naruse employs it only once in Apart from You. That said, Naruse shares with his colleague Ozu a dazzling grasp of technique at this point in film history. He also shares with Ozu a way with his players. The two lead females of Apart from You are particularly sublime. Like all master directors, the details of Naruse's work fall more into place the more you see of his work. Apart from You shares many of the same players and themes in his other films of this period. As Neil Young said, in reply to a heckler who said all his songs sounded the same, "It's all one song."