under the glitter, the torments of a Ukrainian gymnast

CANAL+ CINEMA – FRIDAY AUGUST 26 AT 10:30 P.M. – FILM

Artistic gymnastics had accustomed us to televised images of championships. However, it is as a filmmaker of the sensitive that the 27-year-old Franco-Swiss director, Elie Grappe films the performances of a 15-year-old athlete, in his first feature film, Olga. By diving into her joints and getting closer to her face, he reveals behind the sporting prowess and the sequined leotard the passion and the torments that drive Olga.

The daughter of a Ukrainian political journalist whose head is at a price for having denounced the corruption in power, Olga (played by the gymnast Anastasia Budiashkina) leaves her country, at the end of 2013, for security reasons. While pro-European demonstrations (Euromaidan) broke out in kyiv in 2013-2014, the young girl joined the Swiss women’s team. But how to aim for the Swiss medal at the European championships when, beyond 2,000 kilometers, his country is bleeding?

To show the rise to power of the riots and the precision work of the gymnast imbued with guilt, Elie Grappe weaves together two regimes of images: the fiction recounts the training scenes while the archive scrolls videos filmed by the protesters themselves on a phone screen. A montage as chiseled as the sequences of figures of the gymnast supports the paradox that innervates his apprenticeship novel.

Political gymnastics

On several occasions, we are amazed by the areas of friction between the Ukrainian revolution and Olga’s ceremonial hardening. From the fall of an unbolted statue of Lenin to the suspended body of the teenager at the bar, the smoke bombs of “Independence Square” (Maidan Nezalejnosti), in kyiv, to the snow-covered fir trees of the Swiss Alps, from the blows dealt to the demonstrators to the rear flips of the athlete, the filmmaker cultivates dramatic harshness with plastic wonder.

The sound score by Pierre Desprats, conceived in close connection with the mobility of tendons and muscles, makes sports practice feverish: while Olga has lost her Ukrainian nationality for Switzerland, her gymnastics becomes political. In its wake, the film turns away from the daily life of the club, of which we will retain, among other things, the water spray sprayed on the uneven bars to imbue the competition with a metaphysical dimension.

With a pronounced taste for the night, Elie Grappe transforms the moonlight descents and Olga’s half spins into cast shadows of the fight waged, far from the Slavic front. If the film sometimes struggles to get out of the stylistic exercise, there is also an intelligence and a formal virtuosity at work, which we find, with all the lights off, in the chalk-studded face of the heroine.

Olga, by Elie Grappe. With Anastasia Budiashkina, Sabrina Rubtsova, Jérôme Martin (Fr., Sui., Ukr., 2021, 87 min).

Maroussia Dubreuil