On Saturday, I watched "Senna" with a friend who loves motor racing as much as me. In this entry I intend to give a combination description of the experience and review.
Firstly, an explanation of the blog entry title. I would guess that 80% of the readers of this blog already know the story of Ayrton Senna's life (and that most of the other 20% are robots or algorithms). I've tagged the entry for the benefit of people like Turkey Machine, who specifically requested I not tell them what precisely is shown in the film - presumably to ensure they get the full impact of the movie when they get to see it. The staggered release system for "Senna" means that many of my friends simply haven't had the chance to see it for themselves.
If you are in such a situation and wish to avoid spoilers, please do not read below the horizontal line below:
Here goes, then...
The screening I went to was on the second day of general release, but "general release" in the UK was in two stages. I had to go to a cinema 20 miles away and my friend considerably further, but I understand my local cinema will have the film in a few weeks' time. This is good news because I would like to take my parents to see the film too. They like F1 too but are not as obsessed with it as I am.
The screening was about three-quarters full, which is not bad for a lunchtime performance (I've been to first-week lunch screenings of films before where there was just me and a friend in the room). It was difficult to judge the knowledge level of the audience but I think from the reactions quite a few were F1 fans. Nearly everyone was an adult and the non-adults were all teenagers that were only slightly too young to have seen Senna race. Certainly nobody looked like they'd been dragged to the cinema.
The film started, as cinema films usually do, with adverts. Two in particular were notable for the reactions they drew from the crowd. There was an advert of Lewis Hamilton promoting Tag Heuer watches - the same brand his hero Ayrton used to promote back when he raced for McLaren. The ad wasn't deliberately trying to draw any comparison with Ayrton's versions, with Lewis saying the same bland platitudes he's been saying about watches for quite a while. I'm not sure whether it was the historic echoes or the completely unconvincing performance from Lewis, but there was a considerable amount of laughter during the advert.
What the audience found even funnier was a mobile phone advert where one person tries to spoil a film another character is about to see. The advert would have been pretty amusing whatever film it had preceded, but the place erupted in laughter when the ending was supposedly spoiled with, "The guy gets the girl in the end". Considering this was probably the only film playing in this cinema all summer where everyone in the room knew that wouldn't be the film's conclusion...
The film opened with a really grainy sequence from a karting championship in 1978. The footage improved in quality as the film went on, which helped give a feeling of verisimilitude to proceedings (the better-quality later footage fits in perfectly with the rapidly-improving technology of the time). During the sequence, Ayrton talks about this time being a time when life wasn't about politics or money, but about pure racing. This was a recurring theme of the film.
It was also the first point where I realised the subtitles would be crucial to my enjoyment of the film. The letters were clear enough to me when the spoken words needed translating, but it is crucial that you don't sit behind any tall people. Also, if any tall people happen to be reading this, please do everyone a favour by sitting near the back of the room.
After this, the action jumped to 1984, with another brief stop in 1985 before reaching 1988. At this point the film took off, with the relationship between Ayrton and Alain Prost being carefully described by several journalists who were covering F1 at the time. While Ayrton is clearly depicted as the hero of the piece, Alain is not painted as a villain so much as someone who happened to have the polar opposite technique for how to race. One that did involve the politics of the sport Ayrton hated as well as a more cautious, calculating approach to driving. Both are shown to have well-developed senses of humour. The bitter battle was shown as between two people whose contrasting attitudes made hostilities inevitable but who ultimately were mostly reasonable people.
This is more than can be said for Jean-Marie Balestre, who came across as something of a pantomime villain. Power-hungry, loving the spotlight in the few scenes in which he appeared. It is clear he was deeply unpopular with many of the drivers and even Alain (who is shown to be friends with Jean-Marie in an earlier part of the film) didn't exactly appear upset when he gets his comeuppance in a driver briefing. All the driver briefing scenes are brilliant and previously unseen, but that final one is so good that I refuse to spoil it with how the comeuppance occurs, even in a review with "contains spoilers" tagged.
Some of Ayrton's greatest opponents got hardly any airtime. Nigel Mansell in particular didn't get two lines in the whole piece due to the narrative focus on Ayrton and Alain. Not without reason, for the film acknowledges that a lot of new fans came to F1 because of the Senna/Prost duels. This was particularly the case in Brazil. The demonstration of what Ayrton meant to Brazil in the early 1990s, of what sort of symbol he had become to them even at the turn of the decade, is perhaps the film's strongest point. I've seen a fair few biographies and articles about Senna since I started following F1 and none of them are anywhere near as good at describing the connection between nation and hero. Furthermore, it's the area of the film where Ayrton's words are left to stand alone to the greatest extent. While the journalists strengthened the film with their contributions elsewhere, the greatest aural joy of the film is to hear Ayrton's passionate and thoughtful words about his supporters and his country. If this film causes a desire among supporters and the F1 paddock to try forging that depth of connection again, then that will have been worth the cost of creating the movie on its own.
The one thing every non-F1 supporter remembers about Senna is his death and it was always going to be a tough one for the film-makers to cover. There is a reasonable amount of background given. They didn't just settle for showing Rubens Barrichello's and Roland Ratzenberger's crashes, but the journalists commenting on the effects this had on Ayrton alongside his changing demeanour as the weekend progressed.
The footage of the race itself is pretty graphic. The startline crash is shown in all its explosive fury and the footage of Senna's crash is not the relatively sanitised BBC footage that many people will be accustomed to seeing. It is from the world feed, which means we see much more of the crash's consequences - including the medical staff's ultimately futile work to try to save Ayrton. Viewers of a more sensitive disposition would be advised to leave the room for about 15 minutes after Barrichello's crash and come back for the credits (the "come back" advice I will explain later).
The funeral is particularly saddening. I know that sounds like stating the obvious, but this one was even worse to watch than I'd anticipated due to the particularly moving way one specific part was depicted. The camera focuses on each of the major players at the funeral, showing a brief flashback to some happier time involving that individual and Ayrton earlier in the film. My eyes were stinging, which may not sound like much but it's the closest I've come to crying at a film or similar storytelling medium for nearly two decades. It was just that powerful.
Having said all that, the film does not end on a sad note. Firstly, there is a little segment of interview that is a continuation of the karting sequence that started the film. It tied the film together beautifully. The credit sequence following it not only had a lovely jaunty tune called "Maracatu Atomico", but shows a whole bunch of footage that didn't make it into the main body of the film, showing a variety of facets of Ayrton's personality. This is very much a film to be watched until the end, and is the reason why I advised everyone who wanted to miss the crashes to see this last bit.
So after taking me, my friend and lots of other people on an emotional rollercoaster, everyone left with smiles on their faces - and slightly wider eyes because we were still taking in the full impact of the previous 106 minutes. A fantastic film which deserves to be seen by anyone who loves F1, biographies or simply a good tale well told. Asif Kapadia and Manish Pandey, the director and writer of "Senna", should be very proud of themselves.
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