An aging cyclist grapples with his declining career during the Irish
stages of the 1998 Tour de France.
Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Kieron J. Walsh
Starring: Louis Talpe, Matteo Simoni, Tara Lee, Iain Glen
Few sports have been tarnished by cheating scandals quite like
professional cycling. Ask any random punter to name a famous cyclist and
they'll most likely reply with the name of Lance Armstrong, not because
they know him for his sporting achievements but because his name is now a
byword for illegal performance enhancement.
The full scale of the sport's issues with doping came to light during the
1998 edition of the cycling world's Superbowl, the Tour de France. While
no riders failed drug tests during the event, several were disqualified
when steroids were found in their hotel rooms. Subsequent confessions and
revelations have since attested that the majority of riders in the event
were using some form of performance enhancement drugs, mostly the steroid
EPO.
With The Racer, director Kieron J. Walsh takes us back to the opening stages of
the 1998 Tour de France, which were held in Ireland, to tell a fictional
tale of an aging rider grappling with an uncertain future amid the madness
of the race.
Walsh's underdog athlete is Belgian rider Dom Chabol (Louis Talpe, a handsome hybrid of Guy Pearce and Liev Schreiber). At 38, he knows
his career is almost up and he's entering the Tour under a cloud of
uncertainty, the team's manager refusing to discuss renewing his contract
until after the race. Dom has been a loyal servant of his team for two
decades, performing the role of "domestique", a rider whose job is not to
win stages, but to ensure the team's star, cocky Italian Tartare (Matteo Simoni), takes the yellow jersey. As one character cruelly puts it, Dom is a
"professional loser."
Those cutting words come from the lips of Lynn (Tara Lee), the
pretty tour doctor Dom falls for over the course of the three stages. Lynn
becomes aware of Dom's drug use and tries to discourage him, particularly
after seeing him almost succumb to a late night heart attack. But Dom
knows that with practically every other rider similarly cheating, he
simply can't compete through legal methods.
The Racer takes a cynical but realistic view of
professional cycling in an era when cheating was accepted as something
everyone guessed was occurring on a grand scale but had yet to be exposed
with evidence. This might be a turnoff for some viewers, particularly
those who are fans of the sport, as the movie refuses to take a moral
position regarding its protagonist's cheating.
For those of us who can get onboard, Walsh's sports drama crackles with
the energy of a crime thriller. Plunging us into a politically incorrect,
hyper-masculine world where winning - or in Dom's case, ensuring someone
else's victory - is all that counts, it bears the influence of the sports
movies of former baseball player turned filmmaker Ron Shelton, and you
could imagine Kevin Costner playing the lead role if this were a Hollywood
movie from decades past. It follows a template we've seen in several
boxing dramas, with an aging athlete caught between his professional
ambitions and the love of a good woman, and while it hits a few familiar
notes, it's always in tune.
What makes The Racer so distinctive is in how it's also
essentially a crime drama. It asks us to sympathise with and even root for
someone who is breaking the law, and who coerces others into similarly
discarding their ethics (Lynn risks her fledgling career at one point when
she's asked to perform a drug test on Dom). It's testament to Walsh's
directorial skills and particularly the taciturn charisma of Belgian actor
Talpe, that we remain invested in Dom's story. Immediately after watching
The Racer I found myself asking how I could have so much
empathy with a man who was helping to destroy his sport, but then I
reminded myself that cinema has made me empathise with far worse figures.
Most crime thrillers ask us to root for bad men, so why shouldn't a sports
drama?
Like the character he plays here, Talpe is in his late thirties and has
spent most of his career in supporting roles. On the strength of his
performance in The Racer, I suspect we'll be seeing him wearing the acting equivalent of the
yellow jersey in the future. His is a (literally) muscular performance
that recalls the early work of Stallone in the
Rocky franchise. Walsh frequently shoots Talpe's body in
close-ups while riding or on an exercise bike, capturing every sinew and
popping vein in detail. The camera and editing reduces Talpe and Dom's
body into constituent muscles, taking him apart like a slaughterhouse
butcher, and it's made clear that while sport produces megastars, many
athletes are reduced to the level of human livestock. This idea that Dom
is a victim of a cynical sport, as much as a willing participant, goes a
long way in keeping us onboard with his battered and broken rider all the
way to the finish line.
The Racer is in Irish cinemas now
and in UK cinemas and on Digital from December 18th.
