The best film we saw at the Berlin Film Festival this year was John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection. The title may suggest your typical sports documentary, but Julien Faraut’s feature is anything but. A formally thrilling, fascinating probe into how the realms of cinema and tennis relate, it’s an essential viewing for any cinephile–regardless of your feeling towards the sport of tennis. Narrated by Mathieu Amalric, the first U.S. trailer has now arrived ahead of a release next month from Oscilloscope Laboratories.
Rory O’Connor said in his review, “It is a film very much about that volatile legend but it’s bookended with a quote from his namesake, the similarly antagonistic Jean-Luc Godard who, in an interview with l’Equipe, once uttered the immortal words: “Sport tells the truth, cinema doesn’t.” Faraut sets out to find that truth but also to show how tennis, or how we consume it at least, is in itself cinematic. Gil certainly shot it as such using multiple angles, close-ups, slow motion, and even makeshift clapper boards. Faraut makes the point that however we choose to view it, it’s the sport itself that provides what we hope to see at the movies: drama, triumph, anguish, heroes, villains, a story arc, and so on.
Check out the trailer below, along with a Q&A with the director from the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Art of the Real festival.
Written and directed by Julien Faraut and narrated by Mathieu Amalric, JOHN MCENROE: IN THE REALM OF PERFECTION revisits the rich bounty of 16-mm-shot footage of the left-handed tennis star John McEnroe, at the time the world’s top-ranked player, as he competes in the French Open at Paris’s Roland Garros Stadium in 1984. Close-ups and slow motion sequences of McEnroe competing, as well as instances of his notorious temper tantrums, highlight a ”man who played on the edge of his senses.” Far from a traditional documentary, Faraut probes the archival film to unpack both McEnroe’s attention to the sport and the footage itself, creating a lively and immersive look at a driven athlete, a study on the sport of tennis and the human body and movement, and finally how these all intersect with cinema itself.
John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection opens on August 22.