Another first class movie about a sport I don’t care about

OK, this is getting repetitive. This is the third time in a week that I, who claim that have no interest in sports whatsoever, watch a sport themed film and end up loving it.

My credibility is falling. Sorry.

The thing is that motor sports leave me ice cold. It’s beyond my grasp why someone would like to watch extremely noisy cars doing the same round 60 times in a row. How do you even keep them apart? They all look the same.

And what’s there to admire about the guys who drive them? If they ever get wet, it’s not by sweat but by champagne, which they love to poor over themselves instead of drinking it. (Which I guess is a good thing, they’re trying to put up an example there. Don’t drink and drive!) They seem to be fearless, not to say stupid, risking their lives on a daily basis. But is that a good thing? And as with all material depending sports you may ask who the true competitor and sportsman is – the one who holds the steering wheel or the mechanic in the background? In the end I’ve always assumed it’s about money and possibly some weird blood thirst deep down, since the crashes is what brings the drama and nerve to it.

Praise at Kermode
I knew nothing about Formula One before I watched Senna and obviously I had never ever heard of the guy whose life it depictures, the Brazilian driver Ayrton Senna, who won the world championships three times before dying in an accident in 1994.

The idea to watch a documentary about car racing wouldn’t have occurred to me if it wasn’t for my reoccurring critic darling Mark Kermode. While being as much of an opponent to motor sports as I am, he sang his praise for this film on several occasions last year and was quite upset when the Academy didn’t include it in their short list of documentaries eligible for the Oscar.

Ever since I heard about it the first time in his podcast, I’ve been waiting for it to come up in a theatre near me. I thought chances would be fair since my country has a story from the past of our own famous Formula One driver, Ronnie Peterson. He died in an accident in 1978 and caused headlines equivalent to if the World War 3 had broken out. Maybe something of our old connection to this sport still would linger? But apparently not. Perhaps our interest in Formula One died with our one star driver. In any case someone must have decided that Senna wouldn’t sell any tickets in Sweden, so I had to wait until it turned up in my video rental store.

I’m glad I finally got to see it though, because it turned out that Kermode was right.

Archive footage
Senna is a very well made documentary and one of my two favourites from 2011 (the other one being This is Not a Film). I can’t quite pinpoint what’s so good about this film, but I think might have to do with that the story is told through archive footage. There are some interviews with people sharing memories from the time, but you only hear the voices. It gives a feeling of authenticity.

Of course I realize that the script of a documentary film is just as carefully elaborated as the one of any feature movie. You build up a story in a certain way, you present conflicts to make it more interesting, you assign heroes and villains and you pace it in such a way that you’ll make sure to keep the viewer alert and invested all the way through. Senna does all this, but you never feel manipulated, not for a second. Everything feels natural and genuinely true, which is one of the reasons why it’s so good.

Hard to watch
I admit that I was a bit of a mess as the credits started to roll. The last 20 minutes of the film, including the footage from the crash, are hard to watch. I knew all along that he was going to die; nevertheless it took me hard. And what really made it burst for me was watching his antagonist for many years, the racing driver Alain Proust, carrying the coffin and learning about what Senna had meant to the people in Brazil. He gave them hope. He gave the one thing in their life that was fun. And eventually he gave them of his money, founding a charity that until this day has helped 12 million poor children to a better life.

Senna inspires me, not to go into Formula One racing, but to become a better person and make a difference to the world with my life. That’s quite an achievement for a documentary about a sport I don’t care about in the first place.

And I can only agree that it’s incomprehensible that Senna didn’t get an Academy nomination. But then again, I suppose that the Academy like the Formula One scene is a place where you don’t always understand the decisions, since they ultimately are decided by politics. Oh, the irony.

Senna (Asif Kapadia, UK, 2011) My rating: 5/5