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The film takes as its starting point the discipline of the Modern Pentathlon, an arcane but still surviving Olympic sport comprised of running, swimming, shooting, horseback riding, and fencing. Its five formalized events were chosen by Baron de Coubertin, founder of the Modern Olympics, to encapsulate the romantic adventures of a gentleman liaison officer who fights his way on horseback, foot, and finally through water, to deliver an urgent message.
“Loneliness and the Modern Pentathlon” archly hangs this rarified sporting discipline on the general structure of the British Angry Young Man film classic “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" (1962). This newly imagined version will also be set in an isolated school in rural England and will likewise plumb themes of individualism versus collectivity. Yet, crucially, elements have changed . . . In “Loneliness and the Modern Pentathlon,” a charismatic headmistress (rather than headmaster), played by an iconic film star, presides over the daily life of her charges, a group of young Modern Pentathletes. The surveying gaze of this authoritarian but sensual coach puts into perspective the athletes’ communal activities. Her regard –sometimes tender, sometimes cool-- is echoed by the observations of a roving camera in a flowing series of vignettes which accumulate in a loose and poetic rhythm rather than a strict narrative.
The film subtly plays up the performative, formal qualities of the existing Modern Pentathlon discipline, bending them from truth to fiction. The green place where the youths of this film reside resembles a strange combination of military academy, hippy commune, and early modern utopian community. Despite the fact that the athletes seem to be imprisoned in rigorous routine, they also appear to enjoy a surprisingly loose camaraderie, a hopeful spirit. Practicing their five sports together in a rippling choreography and –unexpectedly-- sitting peacefully side by side at their daily activity of weaving at the loom, they appear to make up an odd kind of ideal civilization, simultaneously unfettered yet disciplined, their emotions intense but contained.
“Loneliness and the Modern Pentathlon” humorously attempts an optimistic, slightly awkward, artistic syncretism, weaving together and fusing genres and disciplines in a playful way. Portrayed by dancers as well as Olympic hopefuls, the athletes in the film meld sport with dance, so that their activities create a new genre of experimental physical movement. The film is saturated with painterly color and shot through with visual references to hopeful avant-garde moments as diverse as Bauhaus director Oskar Schlemmer’s fantastical theater and Joan Jonas’ tactile performance art. Gracing the athletes’ costumes are woven bands of color; these five colors, close to the Olympic signature, appear also in eccentric additions to sporting gear . . . the athletes paint white lines on a lawn to mark out a fencing field; the lines become drawing . . . a row of ascending and descending arms at the shooting range becomes dance. In a sense, the film lightly strives towards a kind of ‘artistic pentathlon,’ a humorous 21st century embodiment of what Sonia Delaunay called, in the 1920’s, “Simultaneous Art” or what the Bauhaus idealized as “Gesamtkunstwerk:” Total Artwork.
This struggle of the early avant-garde for wholeness –its passionate urgency and its ultimate disappointment-- is reflected in the history of the Modern Pentathlon discipline itself. Invented in 1909 by Baron de Coubertin, a French aristocrat whose father was an artist, the Modern Pentathlon was meant to test the metal of the ultimate “complete athlete”--its five events echoing the five Olympic rings, creating a circle of total realization that enclosed mental as well as physical prowess. The Modern Pentathlon today strips itself of sentimental associations and strives to remain ‘the ultimate Olympic event,’ yet relentlessly fails to escape its marginal status. Its position as a ‘minority’ sport seemed insured already at its inception, as even in 1909 it was anachronistic to model a contemporary sport on an aristocratic archetype. From the beginning, the Modern Pentathlon was paradoxically tinged with both a flush of ambition and a grayish cast of loss.
“Loneliness and the Modern Pentathlon” will embody this special irony, toying with the delightful absurdity and, indeed, the loneliness inherent in a single person’s aspiration to master five disciplines, to expand into a “modern” super-person. Each athlete, changing costume, equipment, and action for every sport, creates distinct identities throughout the film; personas subtly change with attire and attitude, and this process is highlighted by brief “locker room” scenes depicting physical transformations and barely discernible psychological shifts. Particular athletes are highlighted across transitions –shedding old skins and adopting new ones-- to make bodily and psychic transformations more theatrically visible.
The notion of chameleon-like role-playing, or splitting of identity, will be further deepened by the casting of the headmistress's role. Played by a recognizable star of avant-garde film, her presence will evoke a life of multiple identities and journeys through many roles –an ego simultaneously imperious and highly flexible. In focusing on this singular, recognizably unique individual who remains distinct from a miniature army of masterful individuals, the film hints at questions of collective versus individual identities, and how these are each formed through layered role-playing. Moreover, this actress, an Olympian of the screen, a goddess of a golden age, bears a curious, preexisting, relationship to time and to collective culture: the mark of experience etched in her face, she nevertheless remains timeless in the cumulative memories of countless individuals. Like the Modern Pentathlon discipline itself, she folds time.
In “Loneliness and the Modern Pentathlon,” this actress’s iconic yet vulnerable quality in a sense subtly stands in as a metaphor for our contemporary relationship to Modernism itself--Modernism is resilient aristocrat, a star who refuses to grow old gracefully. The young athletes of the film provide a counterpoint, representing the blindly striving naiveté, only slightly darkened by teen angst and worry. These two faces, one innocent and one experienced, are each sides of a coin, a paradox that begins to encapsulate our contemporary ambivalence towards what it might mean to be ‘modern’ people today.
In gently investigating the struggle inherent in the dream of becoming a ‘rounded’ individual-- a person of heroic self-mastery as well as of submission to community-- “Loneliness and the Modern Pentathlon” hints that assuming this role requires a great deal of dress up, poker-faced disguise, and slapstick experimentation. In oscillating between passionate urgency and formal restraint, it finds an escape from these opposed poles in what Schlemmer described as the “play instinct:” a joyous celebration of transformation, a delight in artifice.
