The revelation film of the Venice Film Festival finally arrives in theaters: why you shouldn’t miss it.
Tatami it is a great sports film, which with its elegant black and white and its tense and excited encounters on the tatami does not fear comparisons with sacred monsters of the genre, starting with Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull. I open the review of this unmissable film with this sentence just to dispel any doubts about its quality and encourage you to go to the cinema to see it.
Like all noteworthy sports-themed films, it is also and above all a story that tells the real life, the tiring one of those who model and he sacrifices his daily routine to emerge victorious in a few crucial hours that will define his competitive career. Tatami goes even further, because in the life of its protagonist the ordinary is dictated by a regime that makes it somehow extraordinary, in the most negative sense possible.
Tatami’s story is not a true story, but…
Leila (Arienne Mandy) And a judoka from the Iranian sports federation. Her sporting and personal life therefore already takes place within precise limits and formal labels that her rivals on the tatami do not have to consider. She struggles with the headscarf, she cannot be examined by male medical personnel, she must have her husband’s permission to go abroad to compete, she receives constant orders and warnings from her sports federation.
At the beginning of Tatami Leila leaves for Tbilisi (Georgia) for the world championships with the awareness of being in amazing shape. He feels the most important result is within reach: first place, the gold medal. The match schedule puts the current champion of the discipline in her way in the first rounds, but she is not the thorniest threat. Between the possible competitors for the final are an Israeli athlete, of the “occupying regime”. The Iranian authorities from behind the scenes soon begin to pressure Leila and her coach and former judoka Maryam (Zar Amir Ebrahimi) so that the former withdraws by faking an injury. In fact, Iran carefully prevents its athletes from clashing with Israeli ones, moving in and out of the gray areas of sports justice and not sparing threats and violence in order to delegitimize the enemy state, denying it recognition on the sporting as well as political terrain.
Leila, however, is not willing to compromise a result she feels is close to due to the interference of the federation. His climb up the rankings becomes an ordeal punctuated by matches on the tatami that are increasingly complicated by everything that happens outside his perimeter and in Tehran, in a whirling, very tense crescendo, where sport and politics intertwine trying to make the protagonist athlete lose balance, taking away her ambitions and freedom from under her feet.
Tatami’s sporting epic is not based on a real sporting event: it is a fictional story. However co-director and co-writer Guy Nattiv was influenced by numerous recent sporting stories of defections by Iranian athletes. Stories of rebellion of athletes forced to flee abroad to compete, starting with that of Sadaf Khadem, recognized as the first Iranian female boxer or Olympic taekwondo champion Kimia Alizadeh, forced to flee to Germany after winning an Olympic bronze.
Khadem’s story is the one that comes closest to that of Leila. The athlete risked arrest for taking off her veil during the competition; a choice that echoes in one of the strongest scenes of the film.
Tatami is a revolutionary film
Director Guy Nattiv, as an Israeli, felt he couldn’t tell this story alone when he began writing the story. Galeotto, once again, was the Cannes festival, where saw Ali Abbasi’s intense thriller Holy Spider. That film is also a chilling tale of the female condition in Iran, starting from the true story of a local serial killer who killed prostitutes for years, unpunished. After co-writing the script with Elham Erfani, Nattiv reached out to Holy Spider Zar lead actress Amir Ebrahimi, who later became co-director of the film. An Israeli director and an Iranian colleague who together shoot a film about the sporting disagreements between their respective countries: an explosive and revolutionary mix.
Despite the film was shot in Georgia – a strategic choice as it is close enough to the Iranian border but still out of reach of the moral police – using original interpreters from Tehran and its surroundings, mostly exiles, Tatami manufacturing was not free from dangers. For an Iranian, even if an exile, any contact with the Israeli enemy is a danger. Imagine making a film together, a “crime” film which by its very existence postulates how it is possible to collaborate on a common non-belligerent narrative.
Sometimes films like Tatami are so important that it is tempting to overlook their limitations. This is not the case with this film, rightly acclaimed as one of the masterpieces released by the Venice Film Festival in 2023. The amazing aspect of this film lies not only in what it does on a political level, but in how it does it cinematic level: in 2024 you will see few films capable of achieving this expressive power, this emotion.
Tatami gives the same adrenaline rush as an Olympic final seen live
Tatami is a film capable of transmitting the adrenaline rush that real, unpredictable, sweaty, bloody sport offers, followed live. It does carefully employing the visual language of cinema, with spectacular directorial choices. One above all: the close-up on Leila’s face taken from “below” her tatami imagined as a transparent glass, while her opponent tightens her grip on her neck. Scenes that will make every cinephile want to get up from their seat and applaud as much as each of Leila’s hard-won victories.
Tatami, like Raging Bull, is a heartbreaking filmin which an underdog starts at a disadvantage, forced to fight or grapple not only with the opponent in front of him, but also with injustice pressing on the edges of the sporting arena,which takes away energy and concentration. It is not easy to establish which is Tatami’s most suffered and fought match: whether the sporting one towards the final or Leila’s one to stay in the race, pulled, tugged, threatened by her own country, to which of her effort and her gesture Athlete’s technician matters little.
Like any great sports film, Tatami manages to capture the power of sacrifice behind every sporting achievement without the rhetoric often attached to it. In addition to an amazing direction, a stylish black and white of indescribable beauty and two great female performances, Tatami brings with it above all a great internal coherence in developing its story, in creating sporting and political tension, in portraying women ready to make an enormous sacrifice knowing full well what they risk (perhaps even their freedom and life). And also a story of concrete and complex sisterhood, because Tatami’s screenplay never forgets how difficult it is to escape a system of oppression built to be inescapable.
How much the film has captured a truth, an exposed nerve, a pressure ready to explode can be understood if we keep in mind that While it was being filmed, protests broke out in Iran over the death of Mahsa Amini. Tatami captures all that anger, its origins and the terror that rebelling against that system generates, the leap into the void necessary to regain one’s freedom.
2024-04-02 13:18:12
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