Olga: Seeking a better life through sport

Here is an interesting, beautifully acted if somewhat underpowered drama about the connections between the public and the personal in the life of a Ukrainian gymnast during the Maidan disturbances of 2014. Anastasia Budiashkina, a gymnast in real life, plays the title character, who escapes for Switzerland as the protests against the sitting government swell. We have already been offered a sense of the growing danger when her mother, an investigative journalist, has her car rammed while driving through the night streets. Fortunately Olga’s dad was Swiss, so she is eligible to represent that country in the upcoming European Championships in Stuttgart.

The film is good on the tension and loneliness – worse as part of a competitive crowd – in the training camps for such high-pressure sports. There is the constant fear of injury. There are digs from jealous team-mates. In Olga’s case, there is also the guilt of living her life in clinical comfort while her mother and friends are getting caught up in the turmoil.

Budiashkina is first rate as a young woman who, though assailed on all sides and often distressed, has the capacity to put on a determined face when under the most pressure. There is inevitably a sense that the same strengths that assist her on the gymnastic equipment aid her in her everyday progress through an unsatisfactory world. Indeed, she feeds her personal traumas into her sport and allows them to fuel aggressive creativity.

It is often argued, as an unqualified positive, that this or that sports film is “not really about tennis/golf/football/basketball/whatever”. You could make that argument about Olga. The lead and her co-stars work hard at creating a drama about the tensions of close collaboration and the temptation to give in to professional or political pressures. But one does yearn to get a bit more engaged with the technical rigours of the gymnastics game. Shot in flat greys, at home to an understandable scepticism, Olga, Swiss entry for the international feature Oscar, doesn’t teach us much about the activity that we couldn’t have learned from an afternoon in front of the Olympics.

Then again, that was probably not their intent. As a personal drama, Olga works very nicely indeed.