Italian film-maker Giulio Bertelli, son of fashion designer Miuccia Prada, makes a fascinatingly experimental debut with Agon, a spare, sometimes harrowing drama suffused with a chilly vérité detachedness. The film is a Martian's-eye-view documentary about something that doesn't actually exist, accumulating its own kind of desolate force.
Bertelli's film intuits the military roots of three Olympic sports: judo, fencing and shooting. These were originally considered the accomplishments of a soldier in a preindustrial age, and the film shows how the lineaments and forms of violence still exist in these activities. The film is inspired by the grisly accidental death of the Soviet fencer Vladimir Smirnov in 1982.
Three female Italian athletes are shown taking part in a fictional competition called Ludoj 2024. Alice, played by real-life Italian judo gold-medallist Alice Bellandi, suffers from an excruciating knee injury and weight-class worries. Alex, played by Sofija Zobina, is a target-shooter who faces trouble when a viral video shows her hunting wolves with a rifle alongside men who reportedly paid her 50,000 euros. Yile Yara Vianello plays fencer Gio, whose contest ends in a tragic mishap for her Singaporean opponent, with authorities seemingly blaming Gio rather than safety procedures.
Each athlete quietly endures a self-denying discipline that has governed her entire youth. When Alice's knee cracks up for the second time, her scream of pain is mixed with rage and despair. The film presents a very subversive view of the Olympic ideal.
