Sports films naturally have a difficult time: The inclined sports fan immediately recognizes that even gifted actors are not necessarily top athletes and that top athletes are even less likely to be gifted actors. But in recent years the selection of successful films has grown steadily: the SZ sports editorial team presents 22 of them and thus selects the – highly subjective – 22 best. This time 6th place – “Senna”.
The mouth is wide open, the eyes half closed. Ayrton Senna can no longer move his hands, they are so rigid that his colleagues have to bend over the cockpit to free them from the glove. They straighten one finger at a time. Like a crowbar. You have to force a racing driver out of his seat who has become one with his racing car. Had to become. His gearbox is defective, Senna could no longer change gears and had to take the corners in sixth gear.
If you brake from 300 to 70 km / h without being able to downshift, the engine in sixth gear pushes you further and further and relentlessly. Because such a journey is actually not possible, Senna at least has cramps in her shoulders and neck, absurd pain, as he later explains. And at that moment when he gave birth to his first home win in Brazil on the eighth attempt, when even the Brazilian footballers were collectively transformed into racing drivers, Senna looks as if Edvard Munch had captured it with oil and tempera on cardboard. The camera holds on to his mouth.
You want to hear him. But this scream is silent.
Senna’s long-awaited triumph at the Brazilian Grand Prix in 1991 is not the central episode in Asif Kapadia’s massive monument full of haste about the life and death of the three-time Formula 1 world champion. The American documentary filmmaker cut it together from hundreds of hours of archive material, including holiday videos of the family, with Senna in swimming trunks, Senna waterskiing, Senna with neat lipstick kisses on her cheeks.
But the scene is one of the quietest. The viewer, who knows from the beginning that he is heading for the Tamburello curve with Senna like the Titanic for the iceberg, can refresh themselves after the Brazil victory on the probably deceptive thought that the life described was a fulfilled one. Before it ends after 34 years – when in Imola on May 1, 1994 a part of the wheel suspension of a Williams pierced Senna’s helmet. And Kapadia is merciless. He lets the viewer experience the impact with the wall from the perspective of the on-board camera, lets the rescue forces work what feels like hours on deformed racing cars. It’s hard to bear. And that’s how it should be.
Kapadia doesn’t question Senna’s sacred aura, that’s not what he set out to do. He even exacerbates the myth of the sensitive, thought-provoking racing philosopher by having Senna say that his best days were when he was a teenager in a kart: “No money. No politics. Pure racing.” That so much racing romanticism does not want to go along with the coolly calculated ramming that Senna gave his nemesis Alain Prost in Suzuka in 1990 in order to secure his second world title? Nagging! It was not at all about showing the other side, Kapadia recently revealed in an interview with SZ. “It was about my view of the story.” It’s a fan’s point of view.
Documentation never depicts reality either. Anyone who believes this overlooks the filters through which the viewer looks at someone else’s life. Kapadia already puts a filter over the life story of Senna by selecting and arranging the material. And its fund is overwhelming. It also knocks out those who thought they had seen or read everything about Senna’s life, which really consisted of more than champagne bottles, lap times and tire changes. Kapadia’s filters steer the narrative in a direction in which Senna’s approach to the Tamburello experiences the nimbus of the inevitable in retrospect. It shows Senna as a hunted man who fights on too many fronts: against cheers, against the clock, with the expectations of the Brazilians.
What a find from sports history!
And then there is also Jean-Marie Balestre, the then head of the World Automobile Federation Fia, French like Prost, who would have to be played by Robert De Niro if you wanted to revive your windy aura in the present. In fact, in the huge scene at the drivers’ briefing before the 1991 German Grand Prix that Kapadia dug out, Balestre looks like De Niro four years later in his role as Sam Rothstein in Martin Scorsese’s mafia epic “Casino”.
With his hair gelled to the neck and his large aviator sunglasses, Balestre is listening to a passionate lecture by Senna at the Hockenheimring. A Philippika for more safety on the route! Senna demands that the tire stacks be replaced with plastic cones to mark the route. Balestre insists on the rules, Senna jumps up, Balestre almost on his neck, excitedly holds out the rule book to him. And then Balestre speaks a sentence that seems to be borrowed from the repertoire of the Cosa Nostra. “There are many opinions, but only one right one, and that’s always mine.” The pilots grumble. Balestre gets the curve, just in time, by saying that his opinion is now that the question should be voted on. The vote brings Senna a clear majority. What a find from sports history!
Kapadia has decided to freeze the charming man who already beguiled his contemporaries for posterity. To this end, he masterfully arranges the images that tell of the melancholy drama and most painful case of a hero that sport has ever written.
Senna, 2010, Regie Asif Kapadia
Reviews already published:
Platz 22: “Free Solo”
Platz 21: “Rush”
20th place: “The naked cannon”
Platz 19: “Slap Shot”
18th place: “Foxcatcher”
Platz 17: “The Wrestler”
16th place: “Nowitzki. The perfect throw”
Platz 15: “The Big Blue”
Platz 14: “White Men Can’t Jump”
Platz 13: “I, Tonya”
Platz 12: “Battle of the Sexes”
Platz 11: “Jerry Maguire”
Platz 10: “Rocky III”
Platz 9: “The Rider”
Platz 8: “Moneyball”
7th place: “Million Dollar Baby”
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