Article #8005

Three sportswomen undergo the various ordeals of competition in a spare, sometimes harrowing drama suffused with a chilly vérité detachedness

Here is a fascinatingly experimental debut feature from Italian film-maker Giulio Bertelli, son of fashion designer Miuccia Prada; a machine-tooled movie, intensely designed and controlled. It’s a kind of Martian’s-eye-view documentary about something that doesn’t actually exist; it is ice-cold and detached, almost without dialogue in the conventionally dramatic sense, other than the subdued exchanges which we, as audience, overhear rather than listen to. It accumulates its own kind of desolate force.

Bertelli’s film intuits the military roots of three Olympic sports: judo, fencing and shooting. These originally were considered the accomplishments of a soldier in a preindustrial age and shows how the lineaments and forms of violence still exist in these activities. (In fact the film is inspired by the grisly accidental death of the Soviet fencer Vladimir Smirnov in 1982.)