Asif Kapadia, Joe Sabia (2024)

Full disclosure:  in the sixty-plus years that I’ve been watching sport on television, Roger Federer’s major wins have given me more pleasure and his narrow defeats more pain than the ups and downs of any other human athlete.  (The adjective matters:  it’s a close-run thing if I include certain equine stars.)  This is a big part of why I found Asif Kapadia and Joe Sabia’s documentary uncomfortable viewing – and why it grieves me to review the film negatively.  But I’ll have to be honest …

For a start, the title’s terrible.  Although I began writing these reviews partly as a bulwark against amnesia, some things I don’t forget.  Not only how it felt undergoing a Grand Slam final with Federer in it (there were thirty-one of them, all told) but also a now obscure 1973 biopic, directed by Ennio Di Concini, starring Alec Guinness and called Hitler: The Last Ten Days.  I’ve never seen it but the echo in Kapadia-Sabia’s choice of title got me off to an unfortunate start with their film.  To make matters worse, it so happened that just twenty-four hours earlier on Amazon Prime, I’d watched Donnie Darko again.  Richard Kelly punctuates his narrative with legends on the screen that confirm the precise date and amount of time left before the end of the world arrives – ‘Six days remain’, and so on.  Kapadia and Sabia opt for somewhat similar countdown chapter headings.

The worst thing about the title, though, is that its portentous tone anticipates so accurately what lies ahead.  The doomsday event is Federer’s impending retirement from professional tennis, after a doubles match at the Laver Cup in London, on 23 September 2022.  This last match is presented throughout as an awful rupture for Federer, after twenty-four years on the ATP Tour, even though it was also (I think) the first and only match that he played in 2022.  (He certainly didn’t play singles that year; his increasingly losing battle with injuries meant his quarter-final loss to Hubert Hurkacz at Wimbledon 2021 was his last ATP singles match.)   The film conflates the fully understandable personal importance to Federer of coming retirement with his extraordinary eminence as an international sportsman.  The documentary that results is self-important; because of how it’s made, its subject, sad to say, can’t fail to share that quality to some extent.  On 15 September, Federer posts on Instagram a video in which he confirms the Laver Cup match will be his swansong.  The statement he reads to camera is thoughtfully well written; the historic momentousness attached to it is ludicrous.  The film’s on-screen heading for the day in question is ‘Announcement to the World’.  Federer anxiously discusses with a coterie – it includes his wife, his parents, his long-standing agent Tony Godsick and a few others – the risk of news leaking.  Should he share on Instagram without further delay?  It’s as if the future of humankind, let alone his own life, depended on it.

How did the film come about?  According to Wikipedia, Federer met Joe Sabia in 2019 when the latter ‘directed Federer’s “73 Questions” video for Vogue.  Three years later, Federer’s team approached Sabia to film his retirement announcement … In addition …, Sabia documented the final 12 days of Federer’s career.  The documentary footage was never intended for public viewing, with Federer stating, “I was convinced early on that I should have some footage of the inner circle just for my life, just for the kids [to see] when they grow up, that they remember […] how it was, especially that very particular moment of my life.”   However, he later decided to release the film to the public.  Director Asif Kapadia was brought onto the project to turn Sabia’s documentary into a full feature film, which included adding 30 minutes of archive footage and interviews with former players’.

Oscar-winner Kapadia’s involvement also ups the project’s grandiosity.  He and Sabia tell Simon Barnes, in an interview for Radio Times, ‘that their Roger Federer documentary is all about mortality’.  At one point in the film, Severin Lüthi, the Swiss former tennis player and coach, and Federer’s good friend, observes that ‘athletes die twice’ – a remark that Barnes sees as ‘key to the whole film’ (though he misattributes it to Ivan Ljubicic).  In the RT piece, Kapadia expands as follows:  ‘Directors don’t have to retire.  Writers don’t have to retire.  But athletes … it’s a death.  Amy [Winehouse] died in her 20s, Ayrton Senna in his 30s, Diego Maradona at 60.  And there is Federer going through a kind of death in his 40s. …’  It’s to be hoped this jumble of words misquotes Kapadia and that he’s not merely name-checking the subjects of his previous documentaries, unbothered that he’s making no sense.  He underlines the athletes-die-twice idea by pointing out how prematurely three famous people actually died.  One of them wasn’t a sports star at all.  Another was killed in sporting action, in his sporting prime:  are we meant to think Ayrton Senna got off lightly because he was spared the ordeal of dying twice?

On court, Federer was famously a gent as well as a genius, and the evidence of Twelve Final Days is that he’s a thoroughly decent man.  It’s good to see him with his wife Mirka, and to see her looking happier than she could ever do watching on at Wimbledon, at least until the final was won.  They’re openly loving parents to their four children (two sets of twins, two girls and two boys:  as was pointed out when the younger twins were born, a mixed-doubles match in the making).  Federer has, as well as a keen awareness of his own place in tennis history, considerable wider knowledge of that history – and gratitude for what tennis and earlier greats of tennis have given him.  He tells us it was he who first had the idea for the Laver Cup, which commemorates one of the greatest, and acknowledges the vast discrepancy between what he has earned as a tennis player, and what Rod Laver earned.  According to its website, the Roger Federer Foundation, now twenty years old, has created or improved educational opportunities for approaching three million children in southern Africa.

Yet Federer’s enormously wealthy and privileged life is problematic in this film – not because his success is undeserved but because Twelve Final Days is infused with an air of tragedy that, when you think about it (and you don’t need to think for long), is pretty spurious.  The heart doesn’t bleed much for someone whose exceptional natural talent may well have contributed to his exceptional longevity at the top of his sport.  It’s been suggested that Federer stayed serious-injury-free for as long as he did partly because he played tennis so naturally.  Even though he struggled with back and knee problems during much of the 2010s and beyond, his enforced, eventually lengthy absences from the tour must surely have supplied some degree of psychological preparation for when the whole thing was over.  His career wasn’t suddenly and irrevocably stopped in its tracks.

He’s not alone among tennis players, of course, in enjoying a rather high standard of living.  We eventually meet others when Team Europe arrives in London for the Laver Cup – Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, Andy Murray, and more.  At this point, Twelve Final Days starts to develop another aspect that sits awkwardly with the central sob story (there’s an awful lot of getting-emotional, and of Federer thinking about getting-emotional, in the course of the eighty-eight minutes).  The film gets to look like a PR exercise for the elite of men’s tennis and we’re meant to believe they’re a beautiful brotherhood.  There’s a surfeit of talking heads, often in press conferences, where the other players, paying tribute to Federer and looking forward to the Laver Cup where his doubles partner will be Nadal, come out with the usual clichés about how ‘super-exciting’, etc, it’s all going to be.  I thought Andy Murray, a player I’ve never enjoyed watching, came off best in what he had to say.  His words sound authentic; nor does he whinge about his own continuing injury problems, even though they’ve reduced a three-time Grand Slam winner and former world number one to toiling – by now for almost as many years as Murray was flying high – at a humbler level of the ATP rankings.

Asif Kapadia occasionally shows his film-making chops with the selection and use of archive footage.  There are impressive juxtapositions of Federer in the gym or on the court in the film’s present, with shots of his making exactly the same movement or executing the same stroke, at some point in the past:  the latter shots, almost subliminal, thus have the quality of memories flashing through Federer’s mind.  There are also a few bits that may be inadvertently expressive.  When Team Europe gather for a dinner in Federer’s honour and – evening-suited, glass in hand – stand around in a group, the conversation doesn’t exactly flow.  The players momentarily seem real:  they’re suddenly any group of young business execs who, when they’re not talking shop, aren’t too sure what to say next.

I thought I was a Federer nut:  it wasn’t long before I couldn’t bear to watch his matches live; it became a nearly annual ritual, on the afternoon of the Wimbledon final, to go out for a walk until I knew the match was over.  (Those were some long walks.)  But a few of the fans in evidence in Twelve Final Days are something else, wailing to Roger that he’s a sublime human being, that they don’t want him ever to disappear, and so forth.  You wonder what withdrawal symptoms they’ve suffered since he stopped playing.  Thank goodness for the self-aware humour of a banner being waved in the crowd at his farewell match at the O2, and which reads ‘On the 8^th day, God created …’ with ‘RF’ and a miniature Swiss flag emblazoned below.

I can’t be the only fan to feel that this film, because it includes so little footage of Federer’s most outstanding matches or of his thoughts about these, is something of a wasted opportunity (the title isn’t at all a play on the word ‘final’).   It’s frustrating on its own terms, too.  Its structure, in the end, serves to expose the phoniness of the athlete’s-death premise.  We already knew it was phony.  Directors and writers are in a tiny minority; most people who work for a living have to retire and plenty of them love their work, just as Federer deeply loves tennis.  But when, soon after he has played that last match, he tells the film-makers everything’s fine now that it’s finally over, it rings false more loudly.  You know that this supposed end of the story is merely a neat end to the film’s story.  It’s only the beginning of how the truly great Roger Federer comes to terms with hanging up his racquet and moves on.

20 June 2024