Senna
Asif Kapadia (2010)
Motor racing is my least favourite sport and I’m prejudiced against ‘charismatic’ sporting champions – or, at least, dubious about how deeply fans love a sport if they need its practitioners to be entertaining between points or rounds or races. I went to see Senna because I liked the look of it in the trailer and because Ayrton Senna has the morbid allure of an effulgent star who died young (aged thirty-four). I’d despise someone who went to see a documentary about a track and field or tennis star or champion jockey (or racehorse) for those reasons – although I guess I’d despise them less if they admitted why they’d paid for a ticket and that they’d no interest in the sport concerned. My lack of knowledge of Formula One probably makes it easier for me to enthuse about Asif Kapadia’s film because I can’t say if he and the writer Manish Pandey have got things wrong or distorted or oversimplified them for dramatic effect or convenience. But for me Senna is a relentlessly gripping and very affecting piece of film-making – one of the best documentaries I can remember seeing.
The film-making skills of Asif Kapadia (who’s not an F1 fan either) clearly have a lot to do with this but there’s no doubt there are two more fundamental reasons why Senna is so extraordinary. First, Manish Pandey and James Gay-Rees (who produced with Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner) negotiated with Bernie Ecclestone access to the F1 archive at Biggin Hill. I’d guess this archive is unique among major international sports libraries in terms of the wealth of ‘backstage’ material it contains. Second, Ayrton Senna on film has an enthralling vitality. The effect of the footage was well and simply summarised by Steve Rose in The Guardian: ‘… it has been possible to fashion Senna’s story as a live action drama rather than a posthumous documentary. We’re not so much hearing what happened in the past as seeing it happen before our eyes’. Kapadia has been able to dispense with talking heads. His use of reminiscent voiceover – including the voices of Senna’s sister and, just once, his elderly mother, as well as assorted F1 journalists and others – is far from excessive. (In particular, there are just a few, always insightful contributions from Richard Williams, also of The Guardian.)
The cast of ‘characters’ makes Senna not just effortlessly but compellingly dramatic. There’s the leading man who has more than just the glamour of a film star: his face is beautifully expressive and, at one level, emotionally transparent, yet he retains a sense of mystery too. There’s Senna’s notoriously bitter rival Alain Prost, and Jean-Marie Balestre, the egregious head of the sport’s governing body (who appears to have been disgracefully biased in favour of his fellow countryman). Among the engineers, there’s the almost comically unprepossessing Ron Dennis and Frank Williams, whose quietness is rather sinister. Senna is an intense experience: Asif Kapadia allows the audience very little breathing space and gives you a sense of the irresoluble conflict of Ayrton Senna’s life at the top of his sport. You believe Senna when he says he doesn’t like the politics of the Grand Prix circuit; you also realise he’s too passionately competitive to escape from it.
The build-up to Senna’s death at the San Marino Grand Prix of 1994 is gruellingly prolonged but that’s an accurate reflection of the events of the weekend. (I remember it – though more for Declan Murphy’s nearly fatal injury in the big handicap hurdle at Haydock on the Bank Holiday Monday than for the crash at Imola the previous day.) First we see an interview with Senna and the rising star of Brazilian motor racing, Rubens Barrichello. Kapadia cuts to Barrichello crashing in practice and Senna watching in alarm. Barrichello escapes unscathed. Then there’s a clip of the Austrian driver Roland Ratzenberger, telling someone he’s having problems controlling his car. Ratzenberger crashes in final practice and is killed – the first F1 fatality for several years. Voices on the soundtrack tell us that, after this, Senna didn’t want to drive the following day. You’d normally take this kind of retrospective if-only testimony with a pinch of salt but it’s very different when we can see footage of Senna, his visible stress and distress. Someone remembers he was unusually solemn all weekend – ‘I don’t recall seeing him smile once’. The fact that we do see Senna smile actually vindicates the witness because the smile is so uncharacteristically lightless. When the race got underway on the Sunday, it was quickly interrupted by an accident on the start line involving two other drivers, J J Lehto and Pedro Lamy. (According to Wikipedia, a wheel was torn off one of the cars ‘and landed in the main grandstand, injuring eight fans and a police officer’.) The race was restarted and Senna, in pole position, retained the lead ahead of Michael Schumacher until he crashed on the sixth lap.
I’d a vague memory of Senna as a prima donna and, at the time, of being pleased when Prost came out on top in their races (although I wasn’t much bothered either way). But, on the evidence of this film, the gnomish Prost was the villain of the piece: he gives lack of charisma a bad name on and off the track. His calculating approach to F1 racing earned Prost the nickname of ‘the professor’ on the circuit. Perhaps it was the fact that Senna got under his skin and worked on his nerves – threatened his cool – that caused Prost’s deep antipathy towards his great rival. Prost’s ‘calculation’, after the pair’s collision in the crucial Japanese Grand Prix in 1989 and after Senna had got back in the race, is shockingly blatant – he marches to the stewards’ room and succeeds in getting Senna not only disqualified but suspended for six months. It’s hard to say whether Prost is more dislikeable in this episode or in a gruesomely embarrassing excerpt from a BBC chat show interview with Selina Scott, deputising for Terry Wogan, in 1986 – although, to be fair, she’s worse than him. Of course, the truth of the situation may have been less manicheistic than it looks here. Although there’s evidence that Senna was unfairly treated by the F1 authorities, it’s not hard to imagine his getting obsessed with the idea and becoming a pain in the neck about it. Except for one scene when Senna argues for a change to safety arrangements (Balestre asks for a show of hands among the other drivers and they support Senna), we’re not given any clues as to whether he or Prost was the more popular among their fellow competitors.
The film presents Senna as a true tragic hero – a hero because of his exploits and courage, a tragic hero because his eventual end resulted from exceeding ambition. He lost the world title in 1992 and wanted it back. He realised no driver, however good, could compete with the technological advances of the Williams cars so he left McLaren for Williams at the end of 1993 (on the retirement of Prost, who’d signed up for Williams for just that one year, on condition that Senna wasn’t his teammate). At the start of 1994 the recently introduced electronic devices were outlawed by the F1 governing body: the Williams cars had suffered various technical problems in the first two Grand Prix events of the season and – although there are still different theories about what caused the fatal crash at Imola – it’s odds on that something was wrong with the car. Did Senna’s hubris extend to his faith in God? It’s clear his religious belief was very important to him and that’s something Prost dislikes from an early stage – he accuses Senna of thinking that, because he believes God’s on his side, he’s immortal. Senna refutes this convincingly. It seemed to me he needed God as much as anything to make sense of the intensity of his experiences at the wheel and as someone to thank for his victories.
A camera inside the car to show the track ahead from the driver’s point of view is, I guess, a longstanding cliché of F1 coverage but the footage here allows for sequences which (at least for someone who rarely watches the sport on television) are remarkably sustained. They give a dizzying impression of the combination of exceptional technical control and existing on a different plane that you come to believe was what racing was like for Senna. (Perhaps it’s like this for any Grand Prix racer but his exceptional personality and articulacy persuade you it was different for him.) We see the final drive at Imola from inside his car until the moment of the crash. The impressive Professor Sid Watkins, the F1 doctor, who seems to have had a particular affection for Senna, was with him as he lay dying. It transpired that he hadn’t broken any bones or even any bruising on his body but he’d sustained a head injury which Watkins could immediately see from the neurological signs was fatal. Watkins recalls how Senna sighed and ‘It seemed to me – and I’m not religious – that’s when his spirit departed’. Legends on the screen at the end of Senna tell us that Watkins was asked to lead an investigation into improving safety in the sport. I was amazed to learn that no F1 driver has been killed in action since Senna seventeen years ago.
There’s the odd question you’d like answered more fully than Kapadia’s and Pandey’s approach allows. It’s clear that Senna was a national hero to Brazilians at a time when they were suffering even worse hardship than usual. Of course he was young, handsome, openly patriotic. But he wasn’t the first F1 champion from Brazil (that was Emerson Fittipaldi in 1972 and 1974) – and Nelson Piquet was three times champion in the eighties before Senna had his three wins in 1988, 1990 and 1991. Besides, as is made clear, Senna came from an unusually privileged background – it wasn’t at all the case that he’d worked his way up from nothing. (The Ayrton Senna Foundation, set up by his sister Viviane after his death, has, according to the film, given an education to millions of Brazilian children who wouldn’t otherwise have had one.) It’s almost unbearably sad watching footage of Senna with his proud parents, after he’s won an event on the international karting circuit, where he began his sporting life, in the late seventies. It’s poignant to hear him, a couple of years before his death, talk about his future – about being unfulfilled because, he says, he still has so much more to learn about being a man than about being a racing driver. He tells the interviewer that he may not have many years left in F1 but, all being well, more than half his whole life ahead. Occasionally, I wondered if Kapadia was mining these ironies a bit too much and, especially, if this had caused him to abbreviate the clip of a colourfully stupid Brazilian TV Christmas special in 1988, where Senna makes a guest appearance. The excitedly gushy hostess (who, by the looks of things, became a future girlfriend) tells Senna she wishes him a happy 1989, a happy 1990 and so on – up to a happy 1993. She either draws the line or Kapadia cuts the film at 1994.
The film begins with an interview in which Senna talks about his karting days – which he remembers fondly as pure competition, no politics or money. Kapadia uses the same clip at the end of the film, extending it to the interviewer’s next question: which driver past or present did Senna especially like to race and win against? The answer is someone called Tom Fullerton, a British competitor on the karting circuit. It’s an answer that makes you believe Senna’s enthusiasm for his sporting career before Formula One is not easily nostalgic but sincere. Senna hasn’t changed my mind about motor racing. The noise of the engines – a plague of amplified bluebottles – is my idea of aural hell. But I feel grateful to the sport for preserving so much of Ayrton Senna on film, for giving the people involved in Senna the material they needed to make this outstanding piece of cinema.
20 July 2011