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Cinema - Overcoming
In 2004 former professional cyclist Bjarne Riis set up a new
team – CSC - to challenge the established franchises
and attempt to win the Tour de France. Remarkably, he granted
Danish film-maker Tomas Gislason complete fly-on-the-wall
access to the team as they prepared for and rode in the world’s
greatest bicycle race. Overcoming is the remarkable result:
a feature-length documentary which gives you a backie over
the 3,429 km race as the competitors push their bodies to
the limit sprinting against the clock and climbing over leg-sapping
mountains to try and achieve the seemingly impossible –
to help their top man, Italian Ivan Basso, to beat the seemingly
invincible American Lance Armstrong.
Even more remarkably, Gislason does his best in the first
half hour of the movie to make a complete cock-up of this
privileged access. He uses every hands-on filmic trick in
the book – slow motion, emotive music, freeze-frames,
screens within screens, chronological shifts – in order
to try to add extra drama where none is needed. The main problem
about making movies about sport is that sport is in itself
drama: it rarely needs embellishment. You wish that Gislason
would just let things be and let the story unfold more naturally.
Luckily the material is strong enough to overwhelm his over-zealous
editing technique, and once the race starts unfolding you
can’t take your eyes off the road. DL |
