At 34, fencer Joanna Bathory (Cush Jumbo) should be considering the end of her career. However, after a long period of respite following a mysterious incident that tarnished her reputation, the athlete dreams instead of returning to competition, and getting back to the top. But with the Paris Olympics approaching, Joanna’s mental health is more fragile than ever, as are her physical fitness and technique.
Under pressure from her husband and coach, Raph (James Badge Dale), she agrees to test the prototype of an experimental new technology, Halo, which allows athletes to continue training while they sleep, through their dreams, and thus complete entire days of work in a few minutes. During these nightly training sessions, the fencer meets Elliot (Manny Jacinto), a ghostly coach created from scratch by her subconscious. At his side, Joanna will perfect her physical skills, to the detriment of her sanity and her marriage.
Canadian director Nicole Dorsey had Olympic ambitions, to say the least, with Balestra — his second feature film after the noted Black Conflux (2019) — a psychological and paranoid tale of Black Swan (2010) flirting with an impressionistic science fiction that evokes Under the Skin (2013) and some classics from the 1970s.
Very successful on a formal level, the film benefits from an elegant and meticulous direction of photography by Marie Davignon, who takes advantage of the mysterious dance taking place between two fencers, and its countless areas of shadow. By creating a visual palette that blurs the line between dreams and reality, Nicole Dorsey relies on stripping down and repetition to maintain a dull but distressing tension, duplicated by the evocative music of Simon Bertrand. However, we could have done without the repetitive beach landscapes that are mainly reminiscent of American soap operas.
It would have been better if this sobriety and subtlety had also won over the screenplay. Rather than focusing on the fascinating subject of our obsessions with technology-induced parallel worlds and our inability to focus on the present moment, Nicole Dorsey punctuates her screenplay with cheap morals about romantic codependency, the cult of performance, and the pitfalls of introspection. As for the culture of sports and the exploits linked to it, we remain on the surface, without ever really understanding the intrinsic motivations of the protagonist.
The whole thing is also riddled with improbabilities — let’s mention for example the disappearance of a key character that doesn’t trigger any questions. Thus, the premise, although promising, runs out of steam along the way in this film of more than two hours that drags on.
In the lead roles, Cush Jumbo and Manny Jacinto are credible, but must deal with very little material to get us to buy into the strange relationship that unites them and grasp all its subtleties. Just like the coastal panoramas, the dialogues and the shot-reverse-shot games between the two members of the couple are above all reminiscent of the insipidity of soap operas. It all culminates in a predictable and hasty denouement that does not do justice to the complexity of the subject.