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Overcoming
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Sports
movies, musicals and war films often tend to blur together – especially when
they are about a team pulling together, under the guidance of a charismatic or
tyrannical leader, to achieve an enormously difficult task. The model of the
war film was certainly not lost on Danish director Tómas Gislason, who quickly
discovered, while shooting his Tour de France documentary Overcoming, that his real-life material resembled Kelly’s Heroes (1970).
Bjarne
Riis is the softly spoken but fiercely determined leader of the Danish-owned
bicycling team, CSC. He believes in rigorous training (including a “24 hour
survival course”), and insists on total control of his riders when they are in
the midst of the big event. There is no room for egos, tantrums, rebels or
improvised, individual initiative.
This
thoroughly absorbing sports documentary is unique in its genre, because it
eschews a familiar sort of sensationalism. There is very little conflict,
scandal or misbehaviour in Riis’s ranks. A reference to drug taking is briskly
dispensed with. Women – even the wives and daughters of the riders – are almost
never glimpsed anywhere near the team. There are no parties, no binges of any
kind.
Even
more remarkably, there seem to be very few arguments between the CSC members.
In fact, these guys present an model of mutual support, compassion and
understanding that one rarely sees in cinema – and even less in real life. Among the riders are Ivan Basso, Jens Voigt
and Carlos Sastre.
The
obstacle in this drama is not a villainous coach or rider on another team, but
the ever-present possibility of physical injury. This is the limit against
which these men constantly push. And we see that, no matter how meticulous
Riis’ preparation and planning, chance can always intervene, both disastrously
and miraculously.
As
a movie, Overcoming is a high-energy
collage pasting together every scrap of footage that could be wrangled – from
amateur video shots to hyper-professional, on-the-track coverage. Fans of Lars
von Trier’s The Five Obstructions (2003)
will be intrigued to learn that the subject of that film, avant-garde director
and poet Jørgen Leth (about whom Gislason has made an award-winning
documentary), served as a special consultant here – for he, too, has dabbled in
the sports-essay-doco genre.
© Adrian Martin January 2006 |
