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A Film Review : Senna
Tuesday, 07 June 2011 21:45 | 
Written by Jonbwfc | 
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"It was pure driving; it was real racing. And that... makes me happy"
I recently went to see the film 'Senna', which is getting a limited arthouse cinema distribution in the UK. I thought I'd post some thoughts. For those that don't know the film charts the life of Brazilian formula one racing driver Ayrton Senna, from his entry in F1 in 1984 to his death in a crash while competing in the Imola grand prix ten years later. In between he wins three championships in succession and gains a reputation as one of the most skilled drivers of all time. It focuses mainly on his famous and bitter rivalry with French driver Alain Prost and the events of the accident which killed him. The 'story' is told entirely using archive footage with the occasional voice quote from the relevant people - Senna and Prost, Ron Dennis and Frank Williams (The managers of two of the teams he drove cars for in F1) and race commentators or eminent journalists. There are no talking heads. There is no voiceover telling you what to think of what you're seeing. The story effectively tells itself.
And tell itself it very effectively does. It gives you a rounded picture of the man - driven, intelligent, capricious, generous, moody, playful, vastly skilful. A complex man tied to the wild horse of the talent God had given him, unable to slow down (in both a literal and figurative sense) yet striving to cope as best he could, to find happiness in doing what he loved most.
"If you no longer go for a gap, you're no longer a racing driver"
You get a very strong sense of this - that he was a rare combination of immense talent and conviction but often unable to see that what he is pushed to do is not always in his best interests; in the sequence where he drives 6 laps of the Brazilian Interlagos circuit in a car stuck in 6th gear because he feels compelled to continue, to finally win the race in front of his own people, even though it physically wrecks him to do it to the point he has to be lifted out of the car when it finishes; and most tellingly illustrated by him crashing out at Monaco with a huge lead in the race because he refused to take his foot off the throttle when he could have coasted to the finish and won.
You also get the sense that he was at the core a very simple man - the film is bookended by footage of him racing in go-carts as a young man along with him saying that this period, when he raced without prizes or politics or money, this was when he was truly happy. He lived to race and all the politics of the sport was an irritant to him. The film shows his many clashes with the FIA (the authority that runs F1) and his recreation of the F1 drivers union, just before his death.
The racing footage itself is simply stupendous - almost shattering even to watch let alone experience first hand. It shows exactly how titanic and temperamental the cars they drove were, shorn of electronic assistance and with effectively unlimited horsepower, compared to which today's F1 cars are sanitised and domesticated. As Senna says "You cannot afford an error, as if there is an error, you crash". Yet watching his 'signature' drives - coming third in a car that was totally uncompetitive in the rain at Monaco, winning Interlagos despite the car's failure, battling with Prost who himself is recognised as one of the greatest drivers ever - illustrates vividly how.. supernatural his skill was.
"Ayrton has a small problem - he thinks that he can't kill himself"
The final act is of course no surprise but is tastefully handled. It sets the context by showing what a bloodbath that weekend and that circuit had become - Rubens Barrichello going off and being hospitalised in Riday practice, followed by the death of Roland Ratzenberger being fatally injured in Saturday qualifying. That night, Professor Sid Watkins - F1's most eminent raceside doctor - advises Senna to give up racing and just go fishing. Senna replies he can't stop because he believes he has so much left to achieve. By the time the dated 90's onscreen graphic prints up the date of the race, even if you didn't know the tragic ending you were heading for, the sense of foreboding is palpable. The actual crash remains visceral and horrifying, if anything even more so than my faded memories suggested. The voiceover provided by Watkins is moving without being mawkish and the subsequent scenes of his funeral do a good job of portraying that Senna's death affected those far beyond his immediate friends and family. Tellingly, the film ends with a comment that since Senna's death, many changes to regulation were brought in to make the sport safer and that since that day no F1 driver has been fatally injured during a race.
In the end, it would be a fair summation to say that it's a 'tortured genius' story at it's core. It could just as easily be the story of Van Gogh - also a man blessed with supreme talent but forced by the weight of that talent to do things that, in the end, proved terribly destructive.
On a technical level obviously the quality of footage is variable, mined as it is from the FIA's vast archives and personal footage from the Senna family, but the makers do a great job of editing it to allow the story to 'flow' as seamlessly as possible. There's no obvious missing points or glaring errors and all the major players are present, although Prost is notable for his absence - you get a slight sense you're not getting his half of the story. That's hardly a surprise though. All good stories need a bad guy, and the film does at least show that Senna was just as single minded and willing to bend the rules as Prost was.
"There is a lot to do.. but I have plenty of time."
I was expecting something of a hagiography, for Senna to be portrayed as a beatific figure. He wasn't. The film showed him as an individual with faults and foibles but essentially a sympathetic character.
I'd say it should be almost mandatory for any motor sport fan to watch it. This is the soul of the sport you love, crushed down and concentrated and nailed into the heart of one man, beautiful and terrible at the same time. For those for whom F1 is simply a long commute that doesn't travel anywhere, it still has value as a portrait of a man at the supreme peak of ability who in the end finds the things that great gift drives him to do dooms him.
It's the best biography/documentary film I've seen in years, to put it bluntly. If you can find a cinema near you that's showing it, there are far, far worse ways to spend an evening. The trailer is here.
I read an interview with Prost where he confirmed that the filmakers had sent him a copy, as he had been interviewed as part of the process, but that he was unwilling to watch it. Still raw.
There was an earlier crash shown that I didn't know about, and that was far more graphic with his foot actually pointing the wrong way. Can anyone tell me who that was - I didn't catch the name at the time? It wasn't a fatal one, but looked quite shocking - I think his first name was Martin and we're talking mid-to-late '80s.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hSF6_4U ... re=related
Ouch, he was lucky to survive that.
See it if you have a mind.
Two little things that amused me were seeing a full cinema and many parties with 3 generations turning up together, sweet.
Very well written and an article I totally agree with, what happened on May 1st 1994 will remain with me for the rest of my life. I can remember being perched on the tip of my seat mouth open just watching the TV as the drama unfolded, frozen in time and memory.
The Documentary was fantastic with some great early in car F1 footage, I sat in a packed cinema at 18:30 in deadly silence throughout the whole film.. incredible.
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Last Updated (Thursday, 09 June 2011 19:27)
