As "Dirty Tricks" (2021 release; 100 min.) opens, we briefly hear from Lotan Fisher, world champion bridge player, "the next Michael Jordan of bridge", as one talking head puts it, but then we learn that Lotan and his partner Ron Schwartz are accused of cheating. We go back in time to "Rishon, Israel, 2000", where as young boy aged 11, Lotan is fascinated by numbers and his capacity to memorize numbers is even bigger. He decides to sign up for bridge lessons... At this point we are 10 min into the documentary.
Couple of comments: this is the latest documentary from Israeli director Daniel Sivan ("The Oslo Diaries", "The Devil Next Door"). Here he tackles a topic that I literally knew nothing about: the cutthroat competition within the bridge card-playing community, and whether the world's best player and his partner have been cheating the system all along, or simply are so much better than anyone else. The challenge is that bridge is a complicated card game, and we are barely given an understanding of the game. Furthermore, watching players play bridge doesn't lend itself to a lot of drama (unlike, say, watching Michael Jordan and the Bulls). So that makes for a challenging first half of the movie. Things get better in the second half, when the director turns his attention to the investigation by the Israeli Bridge Federation. I was surprised how much more interested I became in the documentary when we shifted away from the card playing aspects of bridge to the potential cheating aspects of it all.
"Dirty Tricks" premiered on Showtime a few days ago, and is now playing on SHO On Demand, where I caught it last night. If you have any interest in the game of bridge, or are looking for al off-center look at cheating in sports (in this case: bridge) and how it affects on an entire community, I'd readily suggest you check this out, and draw your own conclusion.
