Agon Review: A Machine-Tooled Inspection of Athletic Ordeals
In a strikingly experimental debut feature, Italian film-maker Giulio Bertelli, son of fashion designer Miuccia Prada, presents Agon, a film that delves into the dark side of athletic perfection with an ice-cold, detached perspective. This machine-tooled movie, intensely designed and controlled, offers a Martian's-eye-view documentary about a fictional competition, suffused with a chilly vérité detachedness that accumulates its own desolate force.
Military Roots and Violent Undercurrents
Bertelli's film intuits the military origins of three Olympic sports: judo, fencing, and shooting. Originally considered the accomplishments of soldiers in a preindustrial age, the movie reveals how the lineaments and forms of violence persist in these activities. Inspired by the grisly accidental death of Soviet fencer Vladimir Smirnov in 1982, Agon explores these themes through a spare, sometimes harrowing drama.
Three Athletes, Three Ordeals
The film follows three female Italian athletes participating in the fictional Ludoj 2024 competition. Alice, played by real-life Italian judo gold-medallist Alice Bellandi, competes in judo while grappling with an excruciating knee injury and weight-class worries. Alex, portrayed by Sofija Zobina, is a target-shooter who faces deep trouble when a viral video surfaces showing her hunting wolves with a rifle, despite her glamorous fashion-mag cover shoots and sponsorship. Yile Yara Vianello plays fencer Gio, whose contest ends in a tragic mishap for her Singaporean opponent, with sports authorities considering blaming her rather than their safety procedures.
A Technocratic Examination
Agon showcases the technocratically exact way in which these women's bodies are measured, enhanced, inspected, and stress-tested by a white-collar male scientific labour force. This process is periodically juxtaposed with the manufacture of fencers' metal grille masks, highlighting the mechanical nature of athletic perfection. Each athlete endures a kind of unspeakable ordeal, a self-denying discipline that has governed her entire youth, reminiscent of films like Leonardo Van Dijl's tennis movie Julie Keeps Quiet.
A Subversive View of the Olympic Ideal
When Alice's knee cracks up for the second time, putting her irreversibly out of action, her scream of pain mixed with rage and despair underscores the film's disturbing message. All that work, training, and pain culminates in nothing, offering a very subversive view of the Olympic ideal. With minimal dialogue and subdued exchanges, Agon builds a powerful narrative that challenges the glorification of sports.
Agon is available on Mubi from 24 April, presenting a unique blend of documentary and drama that forces audiences to reconsider the costs of athletic achievement.
