[CRITICAL] ON-LINE

Stromba: this is the name of this anabolic steroid, performance enhancing drug used to increase muscle mass and speed up the regeneration, the czechoslovak government decided to offer its athletes for the Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 1984. Finally offer… rather to enforce under the seal of secrecy and under the threat of exclusion from competition in case of refusal.

ON THE LINE, whose original title is FAIR PLAY, is based on this real fact and tells of the journey of Anna, a young sprinter with a bachelor who has just been recruited to the Centre National des Sports. The doctor and the representative of the Committee of the communist Party him strictly, in the framework of a new program of national health, take this product to improve its performance. Convinced that Anna has all the natural talents necessary to be qualified for the olympics, his coach Bohdan/Roman Luknar attempts to oppose but he has no choice.

The director, writer Andrea Sedlackova, of which this is the first film, has a long experience as an editor of films in France, which was awarded the César for best editing for Welcome in 2010. His subject in this film in VO is to provide the context of this communist dictatorship – it may even have left the country to escape the censorship – and we make the plunge into an era and a system of total restriction of personal freedom, in which everyone watched everyone and had to make accounts on all.

She does very well, describing with realism the life of Anna/Judit Bárdos and his mother Irina/Anna Geislerova obliged to abandon tennis in competition, because her husband’s coach, has fled to the West in the last fifteen years. The atmosphere of this Is hostile as one can imagine is reinforced by the game very fair players and with colours of grey and sad desire, that only the pink tracksuit d’Anna came out from the West will come to disturb.

The subject of odious blackmail on the part of the representatives of the Party, these women’s sports to be courageous and calm, do not complain ever, but they are resisting, each in their own way. Their fight and their attitude almost sacrificial we make them endearing and we feel empathy for them.

Anna, who still weighs the past of his parents, is training hard: she runs on the track, in the mountains, in the forest under the snow, on a treadmill with a mask, in a swimming pool almost empty, or even with a tire hung to her hips. It was his mother who made him his bites of Stromba, of which the dose increases more and more. But the side effects (hair system developed, delay of menses) begin to be felt, and Anna is running out of steam more and more, until the discomfort, which will lead to the emergency room. In the Face of the doctor panicked by the secret policy that surrounds this product, mother and daughter will decide to stop the Stromba and return to the good old Vitamin B12. Anna, aware of the risks to his health and his future in sport, will re-double our efforts to be at the height of her friend, Marina, but obviously that will not suffice.

“The context of athletic in full communist dictatorship is very realistic and the courage of the heroines very engaging.”

As to the lonely Irina, she takes the risk of being arrested because it helps the dissident Marek to type texts may be subversive and hostile to the government. She dreams for her daughter a better life, also knows that the sport is one of the means of access to freedom in this system and that his luck is to be qualified for the olympic games and emigrate then ; she will betray him, so his daughter by giving him the Stromba unbeknownst to her, persuaded to act for good.

This film, which offers the viewer multiple levels of reading, also deals with the relationship of trust between a mother and her daughter, who’s more in a context of sport competition, choices that a mother must sometimes make between freedom and the health of their children and the handkerchief that she needs to put on his principles and his conscience to achieve this.

The dream of the West will begin to emerge in the spirit ofAnna with the encounter with her lover Tomas and the consequences of the betrayal of his mother. But this experience will become an adult and if she cannot be free in his country, it will be in his head and in his final choice.

THE OTHER OUTPUTS OF THE AUGUST 5, 2015

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