The Racer and the Jailbird

Non-Review Review: Le Fidèle (The Racer and the Jailbird)

Posted on March 5, 2018 by Darren

This film was seen as part of the Audi Dublin International Film Festival 2018.

The Racer and the Jailbird is certainly a very strange film, and not in a particularly interesting way.

Running two hours and ten minutes, The Racer and the Jailbird is essentially two very different films stitched together. Michaël R. Roskam‘s third feature-length film is a curious hybrid, a passable eighty-minute Heat knock-off followed by an interminable European Lifetime Movie-of-the-Week. How stereotypical European, you ask? So European that it features a completely earnest reading of the line, “I am not pregnant with new life, but with death.” it is kind of brilliant, in its own ways. Many writers spend their lives in search of prose that purple.

To be fair, there is something interesting in the premise of The Racer and the Jailbird, and in its eventual narrative substitution. There is something be said for setting up a premise and then swerving dramatically to upset an audience’s expectations, to catch them off-guard by establishing a familiar set of genre elements and then twisting sharply in an unexpected direction. However, these sharp turns demand a very precise set of skills, including complete mastery of tone and narrative.

The Racer and the Jailbird lacks that control, and so misses the turn, spinning out of control and flipping dramatically before ending up as a mangled heap by the side of the road.