"I, Tonya" The film about the scandalous figure skater Tonya Harding with Margot Robbie in the main role

Black comedy about figure skater Tonya Harding "I, Tonya", filmed by Australian director Craig Gillespie. Harding is the first American woman to jump at the triple Axel competition, and another one of the most scandalous female athletes of the late 20th century. Margot Robbie performed the role of Harding - this is one of the brightest reincarnations of the season.

It is even more valuable when individual films manage to penetrate indifference armor and reach the level of metaphor (examples are known to everyone - "Rocky", "Raging Bull" and "The Fighter". Especially if films are based on real events, because for screenwriters fantasy is always an additional deterrent factor. "I, Tonya" - a brilliant sample of a movie about sports, which, in fact, about something completely different. In addition, the virtuosity of bringing together (including, in terms of external similarity) of actors with prototypes, and the script with real facts so high that, in principle, a modest biographical tape wants to applaud while standing.

The heroine of this picture is Tonya Harding, the notorious figure skater, whose name in the early 1990s was on everyone’s lips. Of course, only people involved in figure skating were aware that she won the US championship and took second place in the world championship, and became the first American woman to complete the triple axel at the competition. But the rest of the world was firmly aware that it was Tonya Harding that had to do with the serious injury inflicted on her national championship in 1994 by her main rival Nancy Kerrigan — not Tonya herself, but her ex-husband with two accomplices. After that, she was for life disqualified, her professional career was over. This story tells the film.

Australian director Craig Gillespie is not a major league player in general, although he does have some cutest films (the best are probably Lars and the Real Girl, with whom there are many thematic intersections in the film "I, Tonya", and comedy "Fright Night"). However, in the picture of the sad fate of Tonya Harding, his passion for sports cinema and a specific, slightly rude, sense of humor turned out to be so appropriate that it is impossible not to appreciate it. Gillespie is partly like his heroine: she is undoubtedly vulgar, badly dressed and rude to those around her, but on the ice she has no equal. Therefore, the director Gillespie, whatever he was, became an ideal candidate for a kind of biopic champion-loser.

Firstly, he feels a great epoch, and sheer pleasure to observe delicate shifts in time, from the 21st century to the end of the 20th. We meet Tonya, her husband and mother many years later, during a series of interviews (in the film they are very close to authentic interviews of the same people), and flashbacks are painted with grotesque nostalgia, conveyed in detail, from scenery to a soundtrack that deserves a separate compliment: ZZ Top, Dire Straits, Supertramp, Fleetwood Mac.

Secondly, Gillespie organically, never pinching, incorporates scenes with figure skating into a dramatic canvas - you do not have time to get bored with monotonous pirouettes.

Thirdly, "I, Tonya" is an example of impeccable casting. The powerful mother Allison Janney has already won the Golden Globe and many other awards. Sebastian Stan as husband and Paul Walter Hauser, the figure skater's bodyguard, are incredibly natural in the roles of born idiots; as for Margot Robbie, it’s impossible not to recognize her role as colossal - both expressive and subtle, equally comic and tragic. Many thanks to her for inspiration and hard work (apparently, it is she who goes on the ice, and performs some difficult tricks on her own).

"I, Tonya" is also a timely cinema in which the feminist agenda is not lodged with parody, but with sincere warmth. Obviously, it was not her numerous shortcomings that prevented her from being on the pedestal of Tonya, but the indulgent, at times contemptuous attitude of the jury. For them, she is just a tasteless maiden from the bottom, who needs to click on the nose in time to avoid asking. The incident that happened is the result of this prejudice.