PALIO (Cosima Spender). Subtitled. 91 minutes. Opens Friday (January 15). See listing. Rating: NNN
Named best documentary feature at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival, Palio dives into the Palio di Siena horse races staged twice each summer in Italy. In the space of 90 seconds, jockeys representing 10 city districts whip their mounts – and each other – around the town’s central piazza while tens of thousands of people cheer them on.
Frenzied and spectacular, it’s an event so rabidly partisan that the riders who lose are assumed to have been paid off by the benefactor of the winner – or by a different benefactor who just didn’t pay off enough of his competitors.
Director Cosima Spender focuses on the colourful personalities drawn to the competition: Gigi Bruschelli, a veteran rider chasing the world record for Palio wins his former protege, Giovanni Atzeni, now bent on supplanting Bruschelli in the winner’s circle and current record holder Andrea Degortes, now in his 70s and wielding his influence like a club.
Spender hangs around with them – and with retired jockey Silvano Vigni, now a farmer with plenty to say about his dissatisfaction with the Palio – while intercutting vivid foot-age of the races to keep the film from being too talky.
Racing enthusiasts will be satisfied with the time spent in the stables and on the track, though I kept waiting for the film to push deeper into its corruption angle. Instead, it’s just sort of left hanging, an awkward fact of life that everyone would much rather ignore.