Senna

Back in the 90s I was a huge fan of Formula One. It’s reasonable to assume that most teenage boys still are, too – between that and football, there’s a visceral, masculine appeal to both sports that one can’t help but find alluring. The huge success of Top Gear in recent years is testament to the draw of a fast car, with added chauvinism to boot. The fact it’s taken so long for a film to get made about the sport (if you discount John Frankenheimer’s stylish but bloated 1966 effort Grand Prix) is a surprise in itself, though it was worth the wait. Senna, Asif Kapadia’s 104 minute paean to arguably the greatest Formula 1 driver of all time, spends little time getting down to business – in fact, one is barely given pause for breath right from the opening credits.

What takes you by surprise though is how sparsely the film is peppered with back story – no studio-filmed interviews, only audio snippets from interviews both new and old, the entire film is a construct created from what must have amounted to thousands of hours of footage (the F1 races themselves aren’t limited to just the British broadcasts – we take in Italian, Brazilian and Japanese footage along the way).

But oddly enough this stylistic decision works in its favour, stripping the film of many of the usual clichés associated with the documentary genre, playing out almost like a fictional account of a driver’s career told through documentary footage cleverly strung together to form a piece full of heroes, villains, action and romance: the requisite ingredients for any self-respecting drama. It’s this almost blinkered focus on Senna’s driving career that propels the film at a lightning pace, with highlights along the way being Senna’s intense and often dangerous rivalry with fellow driver and one-time teammate Alain Prost; behind-the-scenes footage of pre-race driver meetings (Senna defiantly storming out of one in a standout scene); and of course Senna’s legendarily reckless style of racing. Seeing some of the in-car camera footage on the big screen alone is worth the price of admission.

What Senna is exactly is up for debate. Despite plenty of home movie footage it’s hardly a warts-and-all account as the film skips over some of the more salacious aspects of Senna’s private life. But in lieu of recent incidents of sportsmen in the media (specifically the lives of footballers off the pitch rather than on it) Senna’s life was the race track and the film signifies the importance of its protagonists’ role within his chosen field and not the tabloid fodder that may have surrounded it. With a career choice so well-suited to cinema, you can see why the decision has been made to focus on the racing – it really would take a hardy soul not to be thrilled by the footage Kapadia has compiled. It’s hard for me to not be biased, however with its golden period seemingly over I’ve not followed Formula 1 since my teens and I wasn’t entirely looking forward to a film full of talking heads telling me what a great man Senna was. In this film, the driving does the talking. This isn’t a dry expression of sporting artistry in the way that Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait was; this is a tense, moving, and ultimately thrilling rollercoaster of a film, what one might term an unashamed crowd-pleaser – not unlike the driver himself.