Naomi Osaka chose mental health over tennis. Netflix’s new doc helps explain why
If you don’t follow sports, you may have become aware of Naomi Osaka, as I did, not for her playing but for her not playing.
Last month, the 23-year-old, who’s currently ranked No. 2 in women’s tennis, withdrew from the French Open because she did not want to participate in news conferences. Osaka then pulled out of Wimbledon to take “some personal time with friends and family” in advance of the Tokyo Olympics, where she’s representing Japan. Last year, she announced that she wouldn’t compete in the semifinals of the Western & Southern Open after the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wis., which basically stopped tennis for a day.
If anything, these decisions have only strengthened her brand; her fans understand that she is superhuman only on the court; her sponsors, who have stuck by her, understand that her fans understand this. Earlier
this month, she was named best athlete in women’s sports at the ESPYS, and she is on the Olympic-themed July 19 cover of Time magazine, over the quote “It’s O.K. to Not Be O.K.” A limitededition Osaka “Role Model” Barbie, released Monday, sold out in two days.
“Naomi Osaka” is the pointedly simple title of a disarming, compact docuseries that premiered
Friday on Netflix. Directed by Garrett Bradley (the Oscar-nominated “Time”) across 2019 and 2020, the docuseries could be called a portrait, its approach less informational than artistic. At the same time, out of its artfully quilted bits and pieces, its searching closeups and surrounding details, it leaves you feeling that you have come to know its subject, rather
than merely know about her. In
its mix of private and public spaces, scenes of preparation and performance, it’s a little reminiscent of Madonna’s “Truth or Dare,” though where the Queen of Pop is clearly
steering that ship, Osaka is more of a passenger here.
At something like 111 minutes, split over three episodes, it is short by the current standard for streaming docuseries, when anything less than four hours can seem like an insult both to the subject and the viewer. But it is as long as it needs to be, and dividing what is essentially a feature film into three episodes makes it television and gives it a structure — three acts in which she wins, doesn’t win and wins again — that is helpful, given an otherwise free-associating narrative that also takes in
Osaka’s adventures in fashion and activism.
Tennis notwithstanding, its pace is unusually meditative for a sports documentary. Osaka is famously shy and so soft-spoken that it is sometimes hard to hear her. But her message gets across, nevertheless, and Bradley does a good job of massaging a variety of worse and better audiovisual sources into an aesthetic whole, with a soft, pastel palette, that gives the film something of the aspect of an art object, a vessel that contains Naomi Osaka.
“For so long, I’ve tied winning to my worth as a person,” Osaka says. “What am I if not a good tennis player?” She wonders about the normal life she might have missed — “I’m not aware of the timeline, but I think that people my age are in college now?” — but says, “I feel like I’m too far down this path to wonder what could have been.” Those are the last words she speaks in the series, as the camera settles on her face, far from a tennis court, on a boat at sea.