Janus Metz
Borg McEnroe

A challenging sports movie, a film that is a straightforward adaptation of it. A work that doesn’t do much to enrich and give depth to the story, but perhaps not much more could have been done. My feeling is that sports films, and certain sports in particular, are not easy to do well, and indeed, they have rarely been done. Tennis definitely falls into this category.

Not because it is a bad sport: as the film says, each match is like life, but it is practically impossible to tell it in a cinematically fresh way. Pim-pum, pim-pum, the repetitiveness dominates, and in the filmic transfiguration, the emotional involvement and the element of surprise are also missing. It’s therefore not unexpected that the part about the final Borg-McEnroe match is the aesthetically weakest part of the film. The need to constantly rely on commentators' chronicles, filled with many clichés, which don’t help, is proof of that.

To be honest, not everything should be discarded in Borg McEnroe. Even with its elementary grammar and style, it has something to offer. And it’s the febrile obsession of a boy obsessed with winning. An unyielding, inhuman force that actually conceals total fragility. That is the theme: the illness of competitive obsession and the different ways to exorcize it. Some internalize everything, while others spit the venom out. In the end, the two rivals are alike: two difficult children, two people who never adapted to their surroundings and channeled their energies toward a great sporting goal.

The portraits, especially that of Borg, are appreciable, but all in all, the character elements in play aren’t many, and they are reiterated for a length of time with few variations. There isn’t a story to tell, but "only" a Wimbledon final approaching and the tension that grows. The flashbacks are abundant and eventually become boring, turning cloying. A narrative weave that becomes thin and less interesting once the essential traits of the two personalities have been explored.

More space could have been dedicated to McEnroe, or to what happened after that 1980 final. Instead, it ends with Borg's apogee, cutting out the subsequent fall of the tennis god. And although there are questionable episodes in Björn's behavior, the celebratory nature of the production is understood in the finale. Yet the life of the tennis player in the following years saw other significant episodes, beyond tennis.

Focusing on Borg, a sharper narrative could have been conceived, but it would have required the direction of a filmmaker of another caliber. And great filmmakers avoid certain sports films because they probably understand the production difficulties in advance.

6/10