Learning novel on the background of pro-European events in kyiv in 2014, Elie Grappe’s first feature film seduced by his formal virtuosity.
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Artistic gymnastics had accustomed us to the television images of the 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 plunging into his joints and approaching as close as possible to his face, he reveals behind the sporting prowess and the glitter leotard the passion and the torments that animate Olga.
daughter of a Ukrainian political journalist whose head is priced for denouncing corruption in power, Olga (interpreted by the Gymnast Anastasia Budiashkina) leaves his country, at the end of 2013, as security. While pro-European demonstrations (Euromaïdan) broke out in kyiv in 2013-2014, the girl joined the Swiss women’s team. But how to target the Swiss medal at the European Championships when, beyond 2,000 kilometers, his country is in blood?
To show the rise of the riots and the precision work of the gymnast imbued with guilt, Elie cluster braids one to the other two image regimes: fiction relates the training scenes when the Archive scrolls videos filmed by the demonstrators themselves on a phone screen. A montage as chopped as the sequences of figures from the gymnast supports the paradox which innervates his learning novel.
political gymnastics
On several occasions, we are amazed by the friction areas between the Ukrainian revolution and the harameral hardening of Olga. From the fall of a statue of Lenin tumbled into the body in suspension of the teenager at the helm, smoke from the “place of independence” (Maïdan nosealejnosti), in kyiv, to the snowy trees of the Swiss Alps, blows Brought to the demonstrators at the rear flips of the athlete, the filmmaker cultivates the dramatic harsh with plastic wonder.
The sound score of Pierre Desprats, conceived in close relation with the mobility of tendons and muscles, puts on sports: while Olga has lost Ukrainian nationality for Switzerland, his gymnastics is political. In its wake, the film turns away from the daily life of the club from which we will retain, among other things, spray water sprayed on the asymmetrical bars to soak the competition of a metaphysical dimension.
With a pronounced taste for the night, Elie Grappe transforms the descents into a moon and the half-Vrilles of Olga into shadows carried from the fight waged, far from the Slavic front. If the film sometimes struggles to get out of the exercise of style, there is also a formal intelligence and virtuosity at work, which we find, all extinct lights, in the face of heroin chalk.