Agon review – ice-cold, machine-tooled inspection of the dark side of athletic perfection

Here is a fascinatingly experimental debut feature from Italian film-maker Giulio Bertelli, son of fashion designer Miuccia Prada; a machine-tooled movie, intensely designed and controlled. It’s a kind of Martian’s-eye-view documentary about something that doesn’t actually exist; it is ice-cold and detached, almost without dialogue in the conventionally dramatic sense, other than the subdued exchanges which we, as audience, overhear rather than listen to. It accumulates its own kind of desolate force.

Bertelli’s film intuits the military roots of three Olympic sports: judo, fencing and shooting. These originally were considered the accomplishments of a soldier in a preindustrial age and shows how the lineaments and forms of violence still exist in these activities. (In fact the film is inspired by the grisly accidental death of the Soviet fencer Vladimir Smirnov in 1982.)

Three female Italian athletes are shown taking part in a (fictional) competition called Ludoj 2024. Alice’s event is judo; she is played by the real-life Italian judo gold-medallist Alice Bellandi. Alex, played by Sofija Zobina, is a target-shooter, and Yile Yara Vianello plays fencer Gio. We see 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, a process which the movie periodically juxtaposes with the manufacture of fencers’ metal grille masks.

Each of these women has a problem. Alice suffers from an excruciating knee injury (we see the unbearable surgery) and weight-class worries; Alex, despite getting glamorous fashion-mag cover shoots and sponsorship, is in deep trouble when a viral video surfaces showing her out hunting wolves with her rifle (though it is technically called a “sports tool”) with a party of guys who have reportedly paid her 50,000 euros for coming along on this illicit thrill-ride. Most grim of all is Gio’s fencing contest, which ends in a tragic and horrendous mishap for her Singaporean opponent; the sports authorities appear to consider simply blaming Gio rather than their own safety procedures.

Each of these athletes looks as if she is quietly enduring a kind of unspeakable ordeal, a self-denying discipline which has governed her entire youth; the film reminded me a little of Leonardo Van Dijl’s tennis movie Julie Keeps Quiet, which also uses real-life players. And when Alice’s knee cracks up for the second time, putting her irreversibly out of action, her scream of pain is the more disturbing for being mixed with rage and despair. All that work, all that training, all that pain … for nothing. This is a very subversive view of the Olympic ideal.