Orders of Allegiance

Rating: Null/10 (3 January 2007)

Perhaps it was the shambles of the 1980 Moscow Olympics that justified a dramatic examination of the personal and political machinery that drives Olympic athletes and draws an audiencethe motives, the principles, the ideals, nationalist, religious, or otherwise. If this is true, we have the reason why this film would flop today. It struggles to breathe outside of its historical context.
Elements of this can still be appreciated. One, the manner in which it compares the different machinery (order of allegiances) driving Abrahams and Liddell, revealing the full consequences of each character's drive without hammering the point into our skulls or overtly moralising. Both cross the finish line first, but only one wins. Two, the ambitious and much-talked-about Vadelis score that has aged without grace. It has been described elsewhere as striking a balance between classicism and futurism. I can't deny that, however, I think this balance arises more from the nature of the instrument useda modern synthesizerfor a drama set in the 1920s. This anachronism results in an ironic pleasure separate from whatever dramatic and aesthetic value the actual music possesses, similar to Woody Allen inversely placing 1920s slapstick in the context of a futuristic dystopia in "Sleeper".
I could have forgiven the film's reliance on context if it had of managed to harness the inherent self-referential power of its scenarios, but it did not. We have a staggering number of scenes that revolve around the notion of performing for an audience (the essence of film). Not just the races, but a play, a sermon, a lecture, a memorial, a training session, a musical numberand no hint of self-awareness, no leveraging of the idea that this film itself is a performance for an audience. Instead we get a straight story only, drearily oblivious that it too, like its characters, is driven by the political, theoretical, and technological machinery behind it.