THE LAST DANCE

This captivating ten- episode documentary, currently available on Netflix, takes us back 23 years to 1997 when the Chicago Bulls basketball team was led by the mythic Michael Jordan. A powerful psychological study, it examines the fundamental relationship between the individual and the collective.

October 1997. After becoming a globa l phenomenon over the course of the decade, the American basketball championship faced a major question: would the Chicago Bulls, led by Michael Jordan, win their sixth title? While manager Jerry Krause had announced his intention to renew an ageing team in a few months’ time, the season that was about to open promised to be very particular for the game’s biggest star, but also for the coach, Phil Jackson. A peerless strategist, as well as an adept of zen meditation, Jackson declared to the team in the locker room: “This will be our last dance…” And it’s this last dance that Netflix and ESPN have made into a thrilling ten- episode documentary. Initially programmed for release in June – to coincide with the NBA finals – it has been made available early, in April, to console basketball fans who are currently deprived of matches.

Thanks to abundant archive material, the series plunges into the mythic world of basketball, with an approach on the par t of director Jason Hehir that comes to make sense the more you watch. Firstly there’s the idol, Michael Jordan, a central subject, naturally. As well as following him over the course of the 1997– 98 season, we rediscover his extraordinary career through a series of flashbacks that begin in his family’s backyard and continue through university, before showing his arrival in the NBA league at the age of 21, in 1984. It’s the story of a conquest, as one by one the young prodigy shoots down all the basketball legends of the day, becoming a major champion himself as he scores basket after basket.

But a good documentary needs to re- evaluate history as it has

come down to us, and The Last Dance sets about doing just that. To begin with, it allows us to appreciate the full extent of MJ’s genius and aura, his ability to find just the right balance between an aesthetic approach to the sport and his killer instinct. The maestro himself was interviewed for the show, the camera placed at a lowish angle that makes him seem both arrogant and monumental… Though the agile feline of the 80s and 90s has developed into a more massive middle age, we see his instinct reawaken when he discusses not only his past glories but also his former difficulties.

This alone would be enough to captivate, but the real revelation of

the series concerns the collective aspects of the game. The narrative is enriched by an examination of how the Chicago Bulls got where they were in 1997, but Jordan isn’t the only figure to be examined in depth – the more peripheral stars are also allowed to shine. It’s the case in particular for Scot tie Pippen, who emerges as a key figure in the team’s victories, something that everyone realized at the beginning of the 1997 season when Jordan’s “lieutenant” delayed an ankle operation to avoid playing the first few games. Badly paid and not given the recognition he deserved, Pippen still hasn’t entirely swallowed his rancour.

With its many frank witness accounts – in addition to team members, journalists and managers also talk to camera – The Last Dance

shows the powerful frustrations at work between players and managers, and demonst rates how a sport- spectacle machine like the Chicago Bulls could have teetered on the brink of failure. It’s this that makes it such a precious account of the tensions between the individual and the collective in contemporary America, a political and economic issue that calls into question the foundations of a whole nation. Basketball can take you very far…