La diagonale du fou

Geneva welcomes the 23rd world chess championship, which sees the confrontation of the Soviet citizen Michel Piccoli, unconquered for 12 years, with his young fellow countryman, now a refugee in the West, Alexandre Arbatt, winner (conqueror) of the " tournament of the candidates "... The chess is only an excuse for a political tussle, the real game taking place gently in the wings in an East-West confrontation. The whole thing is perhaps a little dated.

Two masters of chess duel each other not only in their game but also in their different ideologies. The veteran Akiva is a Soviet Jew and ferocious Communist, master of his game but also dealing with a declining health while the young and restless genius Pavius has defected to the West to escape from the Communist tentacles.

I love that this is billed as the "thinking man's Rocky". First, this assumes that "Rocky" is not for thinking men, which is not necessarily true. It may not be high art, but it's still a good movie. But that aside, I find it interesting to compare a film about a boxer with one about chess players.

Anyway, whether we accept that marketing or not, it really is a good film. I'm curious about how accurate the subtitles are (they notoriously changed "eight" to "ten" in an early scene) but even if the film was silent, it is quite visually appealing.

Or not?"La diagonale du fou " was extremely well received at the time of issue -it won the prestigious "prix Louis Delluc" and AA- . With hindsight,it's now difficult to understand what the enthusiasm was all about.Heavily symbolic,the movie had high pretensions :the cold war on a chessboard.I must admit that for someone like me who cannot play chess at all,it's pretty tedious.But the biggest bomb is the female parts:what's the point of casting two legendary actresses (Leslie Caron,star of Minelli's musicals " an American in Paris" and "Gigi"and Walters' "Lili",and Bergmanian Liv Ullmann) and giving the first one barely five or six lines ,and the Swedish thespian a fifteen-minute walk -on part?

Disputing the world title of chess, sit down in chairs opposite two soviets. However, none of the two is Russian: one of them, the champion, is Jewish. The other, the challenger, is a Lithuanian, political exile that is refugee in another country. This game will be a mirror of the Cold War: each movement is dangerous, each play is strategically important. Who is the best? The communist Jew, obedient to the Soviet state, or the Lithuanian traitor, enemy of the proletarian revolution? A beautiful end, where the game in itself has, for both, a larger importance than the world title and they consequences. A good film, with reasonable tension, great representative of the rare Swiss movies.

All eyes were upon the World Chess championship of 1972 between Russian Boris Spassky and American Bobby Fischer. It created a media frenzy as it epitomised the ideological confrontation of the Cold War and Fischer's victory accorded him heroic status.

Fischer once observed that "the object of Chess is to crush the opponent's mind."

The political and the psychological have been brilliantly combined in this impressive film debut of Richard Dembo which depicts a fictional championship match between a Soviet stalwart Akiva Liebeskind and a younger, former pupil Pavius Fromm who has defected to the West. Some of the episodes might seem more than somewhat bizarre but no more so than the outrageous antics of Korchnoi and Karpov in their match from 1978 which probably proved the inspiration for Dembo's film.

Liebeskind is in fragile health caused by years of competing at the highest level whilst Fromm, although in the peak of physical health, is already showing signs of the Paranoia which afflicted the aforementioned Fischer.

The director, his first rate cast and his superlative editor Agnes Guillemot have succeeded in maintaining a constant sense of apprehension and intimidation. The tension between the two opponents is given an emotional counterpoint in the strains suffered by their wives, one of whom is portrayed by Leslie Caron as stoically supportive whilst the other, played by Liv Ullman, is distinctly neurotic. The tragedy of the film lies in the fact that the Game of Kings is here played by two grandmasters who have been reduced to mere political pawns.

Alexandre Arbatt is gifted his best role as Fromm and although from the outset he is a thoroughly unlikeable egoist, his character becomes less one dimensional as the tale unfolds. Not for the first time of course the performance that lingers longest is that of the superb Michel Piccoli as Liebeskind. Throughout a long and distinguished career he has specialised in portraying the darker side of human nature but this role is unusually sympathetic and he once again gives a performance of the upmost subtlety. Deservedly nominated for a César( his fourth) he was destined alas to be the bridesmaid, never the bride.

Naturally the film has acquired 'cult' status among Chess aficianados but I do not think it essential to be one of that number in order to appreciate its merits. As for the ideological differences, recent events have again proved that these are irreconcilable. It is supremely ironic that the words "Chess makes men wiser and clear-sighted" should have been uttered by a certain Vladimir Putin!