‘Fencer’ dresses up underdog sports story with intrigue
If happy families are alike, so apparently are feel- good sports flicks — even those set in the grim, rural outposts of the 1950s Soviet Union.
In the biopic “The Fencer,” Märt Avandi plays Endel Nelis, a champion Estonian fencer whose wartime past as a Nazi conscript makes him a target of the Russian secret police. Nelis flees Leningrad for the small town of Haapsalu, Estonia, where he finds work running a high school sports club.
After a young student named Marta (Liisa Koppel) sees Nelis practicing his swordsmanship, she asks him to teach her the sport. So he shows the schoolchildren how to spar with reeds plucked from a nearby marsh.
Despite the disapproval of the school’s principal (Hendrik Toompere), who thinks fencing evokes feudalism, and the ever-looming threat of the KGB, the children become enthusi- astic fencers. When they read about an all- Soviet tournament in a local newspaper, they beg Nelis to enter their team in the competition.
Finnish director Klaus Härö has a sharp eye, and his shots deftly juxtapose the delicate beauty of the Estonian lowlands with the harsh reality of life under Soviet rule. But the script, written by Anna Anna Heinämaa, gives him little more than an aesthetic landscape to work with.
Nelis’s romance with a teacher (Ursula Ratasepp) has about as much heat as a bowl of lukewarm borscht, and the conniving principal comes across as a cartoon villain. Though the camera follows Nelis closely, we never really get inside his head — nor does the film explore the fear, regret and uncertainty that must plague him.
The third act, which follows Nelis’s team to the championship, resembles any underdog sports movie. Replace the Estonian fencers with Latvian sprinters or Dutch chess players, and the plot — not to mention the cheesy suspense music — would be the same.
When little Marta takes on the reigning champion from Moscow, a much older and larger boy, even the principal stops wringing his hands long enough to clap. The KGB agents show up only to arrest one minor character, who seems to have been allowed to pack a suitcase before being whisked away in the back of a black car.
The film showcases some talented young actors, including, in addition to Koppel, Joonas Koff as the son of the arrested man. With any luck, we’ll see both of them again — in a more inspired film.