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Grainy black and white footage follows the face of a racer completely engrossed in the ride. There is tension in them and a certain abstract beauty of film material from the days when cinematography was still mostly silent. The protagonist of the film Ferrari, which has been shown in cinemas since Thursday, last raced in 1932. However, director Michael Mann’s new film captures Enzo Ferrari in a much more complicated period of his life.

The year is 1957, ten years after the protagonist and his wife Laura, played by Penélope Cruz, founded the Ferrari car company and racing team. Director and co-writer Mann with colleague Troy Kennedy-Martin focuses on just a few months in the life of a man whose face reflects many tensions.

His factory is a dream come true and he has become a celebrity, but the company is in danger of bankruptcy. Ferrari is dealing with the grief of his son’s death, with the pressure of the public, with the fact that he has to mercilessly command his drivers and other employees because it is expected of him. He and his wife already live in partial separation, although she had no idea until now that Enzo Ferrari not only had a lover, but also a son.

In a short period of time, a second film biography appeared, examining the family and work troubles of the protagonist. Similar to Maestro about the fate of the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, Ferrari’s film is also full of pauses, omissions and understatements, with the help of which he tries to portray a complicated, impenetrable individual. Nevertheless, there are differences between these works. Where one tends to fail, the other triumphs.

While Bradley Cooper in the role of Bernstein was brimming with effort and pushing the saw, however much he tried to dampen these mannerisms directorially and otherwise, Adam Driver as Enzo Ferrari gives a truly mesmerizing performance that doesn’t need too many words. And not really many facial expressions. At the same time, his wide face and its subtle changes hide both a saddened man broken by tragedy, a loving partner or a steel-cold boss who suspects the approaching apocalypse.

Michael Mann precisely rhythms his film, cut to the bone in many ways, by alternating quiet passages with bursts of noise.

Adam Driver as Enzo Ferrari gives a mesmerizing performance that doesn’t need too many words. | Photo: Lorenzo Sisti

The racing segments, usually in similar works or the Netflix documentary series called F1: The Desire to Win, capture the mixture of intoxication and danger of extreme speed. But perhaps nothing outright threatening or ominous could be felt from these sonic attacks on the audience.

These excitements are in the news a foreshadowing of the crucial Mille Miglia race, which is run across Italy and in which the success of the Ferrari team is essential for the survival of the company. However, the 1957 event ends a terrible disaster.

The film does not portray Ferrari as a monster, but his cold presence in many moments certainly does not feel like a marble monument. When he is accosted at an intersection by a famous competitor, the hero drives off at the green light without giving any indication that anything more than a pesky insect has appeared next to him. When one driver succumbs to injuries during test drives, Ferrari seems to see nothing more than the need to replace parts in the broken machine.

Mann did not make a portrait of the auto giant. On the contrary, he created a dark and hopeless film about a person who often looks more empathetically at a well-running engine than at the people around him. Without, of course, the director slipping into a caricature or some simply critical tone. Enzo Ferrari is a fascinating subject, a strange colossus capable of emoting but often insensitive to what’s going on around him.

The creator, who was made famous by complicated crime films such as The Merciless Duel, has been telling more and more abstract stories lately. One can imagine that someone will reject the novelty as too aloof. In 130 minutes, not much happens in it, it does not focus primarily on racing and the tension of who will win. Michael Mann presents a rather depressing study of a man on the brink, who is still the center of public interest, but at the same time everything around suggests that the world he created is collapsing.

Czech cinemas are screening Ferrari from Thursday. | Video: Vertical Ent.

Many pictures from the Formula 1 environment have focused either on the rivalry between the racers, which was the case of Rivals by Ron Howard from 2013, or on the feuds within the stable like the more recent Le Mans ’66 by director James Mangold, creating above all the heady feeling of the world of noisy engines that turns men into eternal boys.

Instead of this high-octane poetry, Michael Mann draws a much more harrowing environment, in which it is not so much a battle or a symbiosis of man and machine, but rather whether the hero himself is just a machine, desperately trying to keep the parts of his colossus together. And at the same time, many important things slip through his fingers.

Adam Driver lends this “machine” a bewitching charisma. Still, the film thinks much more about the hard bumps than about the moments when you drive down the finish line.

2024-01-05 13:36:36


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