![]() ![]() Transylvanian businessman Ion Țiriac, a Dracula-esque figure who would make Becker a teenage millionaire, had already taken the player on, but no one saw this ascendancy coming – least of all John McEnroe, a goldmine throughout the film, who gave the German schoolboy a rough ride before he’d won anything, then ate his bullying words when eight out of 10 of their head-to-head encounters went Becker’s way.īecker-mania wasn’t hard to understand: tennis hadn’t had a more charismatic superstar since Björn Borg. We go right back to his boyhood years as a remarkable prodigy, one who honed his skills opposite Steffi Graf, then scored his first two Wimbledon titles, astonishingly, at 17 and 18. But the entertaining Part I: Triumph, which takes us up to the moment Becker became world number one in 1991, is 80 per cent tennis and 20 per cent off-court scuttlebutt. The spectre of Disaster awaits in Part II. It’s shocking how much those three years alone – caught in the ever-tightening noose of the legal system, amid sex scandals and financial chaos – have aged him. ![]() Gibney has interviewed him twice – first in 2019, and then just a few days before his conviction. Gibney has taken his structure from the Kipling lines under which players pass as they enter Wimbledon’s Centre Court – “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two impostors just the same”.įor Becker, who served eight months of a 30-month jail sentence last year for hiding £2.5m of loans and assets, that motto may seem a particularly tall order. They appear, moreover, to be the only passengers on the train.Unmentioned in this year’s Berlin Film Festival blurbs was the fact that Alex Gibney’s documentary about Boris Becker, premiering here, is not a one-off feature: it’s a two-part miniseries for Apple, only the first 96-minute half of which was unveiled. Madeleine and James’s train journey comes with vodka martinis in the dining car followed by a colossal woodwork-splintering punch-up with a beefy henchman. but it is all part of the escapist effect. It is of course ridiculous that the pair manage to get away from there to Tangier in such stunning changes of outfit without worrying about suitcases, money etc. When he recognises Bond in the room, he leers: “I see you! Cuckoo!” – a French expression which in fact is to have a darker significance, revealed at the end.įrom here we go to Austria and this is where Bond is to encounter his main amour: Dr Madeleine Swann, stylishly played with just the right amount of sullen sensuality by Léa Seydoux. Waltz’s chief is an almost papal presence of menace, upsetting all his cringing subordinates by saying and doing next to nothing, and photographed in shadow. Then he is to infiltrate the horribly occult headquarters of Spectre itself – a wonderfully old-fashioned “evil boardroom” scene for which Mendes manages to avoid any Austin Powers/Dr Evil type absurdity. Director Sam Mendes contrives a stylishly extended continuous tracking shot to bring our hero into the proceedings and it isn’t long before an outrageous set-piece is in progress with a helicopter repeatedly looping the loop while 007 vigorously punches the pilot and a fellow passenger.Ī clue salvaged from the chaos puts Bond on the trail of Spectre, taking him at first to Rome where he has a romantic interlude with a soigné woman of mystery, played with distant languor by Monica Bellucci. We start with a gasp-inducing action sequence in Mexico City for the Day of the Dead. The script by John Logan, Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Jez Butterworth runs on rails with great twists and turns and gags. He is particularly vexed at the news that a sleek new car has in fact been reserved for 009. ![]() “That all sounds marvellous,” he purrs when advised of some footling new procedural restriction, adding later: “That all sounds lovely.” Yet there is also an elegant new dismissive tone that he introduces into the dialogue bordering on camp. At one point he simply snaps the plastic handcuffs the bad-guys have put on him, with sheer brute strength. He has flair, sang-froid, and he wears a suit superbly well by bulging his gym-built frame fiercely into it, rarely undoing his jacket button and always having his tie done up to the top. That great big handsome-Shrek face with its sweetly bat ears has grown into the role. He is one of the best Bonds and an equal to Connery. Craig showed they were wrong: and I hope he carries on now. Is this Craig’s last hurrah as Bond? His somewhat tetchy remarks in interviews preceding this movie – indicating a readiness to quit – oddly mirror the tetchy media comments that greeted the news of his casting almost 10 years ago. ![]()
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