Senna
Landmark Sunshine, August 23, 2011
Movie #63 for 2011
Ayrton Senna was a Brazilian Formula One driver who won the world championship three times and who is widely considered to be one of the best drivers ever. At 34, he was killed in a crash on the track of the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix. Apart from another death on the same track two days prior, deaths in Formula One are almost entirely unheard of - there hadn’t been one for a generation, and there hasn’t been one since.
Senna is an emotional documentary, rather than an analytical one. I’m starting to understand that even a very good emotional documentary - like this one - is never going to be as satisfying to me as one with a little analytical insight.
The choices of interview subjects is quite revealing for the intent and nature of the documentary - contemporary interview subjects seem to be his sister and the doctor who treated him at the crash site and maybe a couple commentators and sport historians. There are no people from inside the F1 world telling their version of events - especially of the pivotal and much publicized rivalry between Senna and McLaren team-mate Alain Prost (which the documentary paints as entirely Prost's doing). For an analytical documentary it would be a glaring omission: without context - how do F1 racing teams usually work? did either racer get along with team-mates in other pairings? - there isn’t much to provoke thought.
All narration is voiceover (which confuses the archival and contemporary interviews all up) and there is not a single talking head to be seen, it’s all archival footage of Senna looking soulful and charming. Senna is retconned as the talented but victimized hero of this tragedy-piece, rather than a human character in an interesting story.
The reporting is one sided, uneven and lacks very much by way of context. With a little bit of analysis, the film would have been so much more illuminating and engaging, but Senna’s death would not have been any less tragic. There is little reflection on what it means now, fifteen years after the fact and whether it still resonates. Al little analysis would have gone a long way.
For all that, though, it is still a good film - the wealth of archival footage turns up some episodes that are absolute corkers and revealing of the egos that abound in professional competitive sport. And the racing scenes are genuinely thrilling. Color me surprised.
