Anybody going to see PALIO expecting a heroic racing tale of horse and rider overcoming adversity to win the greatest race of their lives (along the lines of SEABISCUIT and CHAMPIONS) is likely to emerge feeling as battered and kicked around as losing jockeys are wont to be by an angry post-Palio mob in Siena’s Piazza del Campo if they’re seen to have let down the district they’re representing.
Not that those heroic elements aren’t there; but the adversity to be overcome is largely in the shape of fellow jockeys whose tactics include striking their rivals on the head and hands with sticks (made from stretched bulls’ penises) as the horses career three times round the Piazza in a bareback race that is run twice a year and dates back to the seventeenth century.
An extraordinarily well-shot and exciting documentary, PALIO cuts between interviews with past jockeys and others either directly involved or watching from the sidelines, and the build-up to the July and August 2013 races – a gift to the film-makers, as the tension in the intervening month mounts and dodgy practices in the interests of winning are openly paraded before the cameras – as a luckless owner puts it, ‘the Palio is a game of legitimate corruption’. Culminating with the race itself, as thrilling and brutal over 90 seconds as the chariot race in BEN-HUR, except that this is real, with actual non-cut-out crowds baying in the amphitheatre.
a bizarre – and to the outside world often baffling – private passion
The Palio is a race which a riderless horse is allowed to win, after its jockey has been thrown off during scrimmaging on one of the Piazza’s lethal corners, but in which both the fastest and slowest horses are eliminated from preliminary selection: ‘if all the horses are equal then the many deals prevail’. These deals are made by what are politely called the expensively-suited ‘captains’ of the seventeen contrada or districts of Sienna: firstly to hire the best jockey available, then to ensure he’s got enough financial backing to secure victory by obtaining a plum starting position. Ten of the districts compete in each race, bringing along their fanatical banner-waving supporters, tribally chanting their districts’ animal-kingdom names – ‘The Goose’, ‘The Tortoise’, ‘The She-Wolf’ etc.
First choice jockey and favourite to win in 2013 is Luigi ‘Gigi’ Bruschelli, already a thirteen times winner of the race and expected to equal the record of Andrea ‘Aceto’ de Gortes, a national hero in his thirty-year career (‘‘When Pavarotti came here I sat at the head of the table, not him”). But this year there’s a new kid on the block, Giovanni Atzeni, a protégé of Bruschelli’s. Though his father wishes Atzeni had done a couple of degrees instead, he’s seen by many as the best chance of overthrowing the regime of Bruschelli who has ‘a harem of jockeys at his disposal’. None of them more obvious than the ‘run-in jockey’, whose starting position is the last to be selected in a ballot and who – allegedly in return for 70,000 Euros – manipulates the line-up to give Bruschelli a favoured place, the more brazen for being caught by Stuart Bentley’s cameras (the whole nods-and-winks sequence sublimely edited by Valerio Bonelli).
So the stage is set, the priest has blessed horses and jockeys in the Cathedral and suddenly we’re in the middle of a classic horse-racing story worthy of Dick Francis, only more colourful and believable and with distinct echoes of Mario Puzo. The dramatic and unexpected climax doesn’t disappoint.
There remains the ‘Grand National’ question: what about cruelty to the horses? PALIO gives the impression that ‘no animal was harmed in the making of this film’, the injuries confined to jockeys thrown off or bashed against the walls of the Piazza. Though animal rights protesters have been vociferous, that’s not what PALIO is about: Cosima Spender is content to record (splendidly) what is, alongside the Pamplona bull run or come to that the Grand National itself, something of a bizarre – and to the outside world often baffling – private passion.
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