听 Overcoming is Danish filmmaker T贸mas Gislason's behind-the-scenes look at the intense, technical, cultish world of pro-cycling. We follow high-profile Team CSC as they fight their way through the 2004 Tour de France; expect agonizing mountain climbs, mad sprints to finish lines, and bone-breaking crashes. But this documentary makes bad use of fascinating subject matter; an utter lack of narrative structure means only Tour de France die-hards will feel a part of the peloton (that's a group of cyclists, by the way).
Gislason wastes no time in immersing us in the 3429 kilometre Tour; sequences covering various stages of the race are interspersed with interviews, and footage from pre-Tour training. But non-experts will wait for information that never comes. Who are Ivan Basso, Carlos Sastre, et al, the riders that make up Team CSC? How far up the Tour leaderboard are they? Even more important, what is the Team's radical new approach to the Tour, devised by Danish cycling hero and team coach Bjarne Riis, that is ostensibly the whole point of this documentary? We're left in the dark.
"FEELS LIKE A HOME MOVIE"
It's hard, then, to extract any kind of story from the succession of arguments, victories, and injuries, that follow. Meanwhile, Riis' monologues to camera begin to resemble a David Brent course in motivation. Only in the last ten minutes is it clear that CSC star rider Ivan Basso has a shot at winning the Tour, enabling us to participate in the unfolding drama. Really, Overcoming feels like a home movie shot for Team CSC themselves; a voyeuristic treat for hardcore cycling fans, bewildering for the rest of us.
In Danish, Italian and Spanish with English subtitles.
Overcoming is released in UK cinemas on Friday 28th April 2006.
