Chess make people not crazy, but the game Crazy keep in mind, the British Chess Champion William Hartston once said. The sentence would make a good tagline for the film The talent of Genesis Potini . Director James Napier Robertson has filmed the life of the New Zealand Speed Chess Stars, who died of a heart attack in 2011 at the age of 46 years. Potini suffered from bipolar disorder and spent much of his life in psychiatric treatment. Mentally unstable geniuses in cinema – by Rain Man on Shine to A Beautiful Mind – a popular topos (and always good for an Oscar nomination) , so it was only a matter of time until a producer would come up with the idea to make Jim Marbrooks award-winning documentary Dark Horse (2003) a biopic. However, the life of Genesis Potini is also exceptional, not to be filmed: He was a brilliant man who fought his inner demons on the chessboard and adolescents for chess enthusiasts, to bring them from the street.
This sounds to typical edification cinema, as you know well enough from Hollywood: gesellschaftskritisch, slightly kitschy and energetic with close-ups of bright children’s faces. But this Genesis Potini whose broken biography reads like the idea of an over-ambitious screenwriter, is played by Cliff Curtis, the only world star of the New Zealand cinema. In Hollywood Maori Curtis subscribes to sinister types, since he in family drama Once Were Warriors in 1994 experienced his international breakthrough as a white trash brutal. It is preferred to be a gangster ( Training Day ) or in popular Hollywood fashion as substitutes for all kinds of ethnic groups (Pablo Escobar in Blow , Jesus the Bible Crime Rising ) occupied. finally see Curtis again in a Maori role in itself is gratifying. In The talent of Genesis Potini he makes also lasting impression, and not just because of 30 kilos, which he has gained for the role.
Curtis’ Genesis is a good-natured giant, the only on the chessboard his inner peace found. The kids he teaches the game blindfolded. The newspaper clippings, reminiscent of its heyday, he always carries with him. Today Genesis is a shadow of himself, pointedly blurred his massive body repeatedly in soft focus of the camera. And if he once forgot his medication, it turns into a helpless child. In this state, he will be taken up at the beginning of the movie from a social worker in a shop: Genesis babbling incoherently and playing with a manic look on an old chessboard moves to.
But no clinic feels responsible for him. His older brother Ariki, who belongs to a Maori gear, pushes him goodbye a few bills in his hand. Genesis has fallen out of society. Shelter he finds his old friend Noble, which operates with a few volunteers a youth club, so that the stray kids from the neighborhood not silly ideas. Among the social outcasts Genesis does not stand out on. And yet an outcast drawn to the shabby hut where the children learn to understand from the chessboard of the world: Arikis son Mana (James Rolleston) is like his father be a gang member, but the boy feels torn between the martial macho cult of Maori -Men and his fascination with the game of chess.
Chess has already had to serve for some oblique metaphors in cinema, most recently in Bobby Fischer Biopic pawn – Game of Kings as a sideshow of the Cold War. In The talent of Genesis Potini the game now comes to a mythical significance: The legendary figure Maui snatched with his helpers Zealand the sea, on the chessboard, the country will be defended symbolic. Farmers, Springer and tower form an indivisible whole with the king ( Maui ). Such socially educationally valuable instructions given The talent of Genesis Potini in homeopathic doses, because director Robertson contrasted the optimism this Bildungsroman with the harsh reality of the Maoris who largely live despite social equality in prefab settlements. With the American feel-good cinema of social realism Robertson has so little to do, could be the film sometimes even accuse his genre studies that – if the warrior tradition of Maori will strive – Updating cultural stereotypes.
However, never giving the impression that The talent of Genesis Potini used Maori culture as ethnographic ornament. Rather, the casual observations focus attention to the narrative conventions of this social tale that long since (currently playing in the German film Bach in Brazil ) to a parody of itself degenerated: the highly motivated social workers, the less educated youth Culture and values conveyed. The mentally unstable Genesis acts more like an unreliable narrator, unconsciously, he shows the social boundaries of the Bildungsroman on. At the end there is also a checkerboard of only 64 fields. It is compact and self-contained.
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