Documentary Queen of Chess (now streaming on Netflix) is a biography of women\u2019s chess luminary Judit Polgar, with an emphasis on her battle of the sexes-style rivalry with all-time great Garry Kasparov. Director Rory Kennedy\u2019s film accentuates the positive of Polgar\u2019s achievements, which found her fracturing norms and boundaries as she transformed from child chess prodigy to international champion. But the film had the potential to be thornier than that, considering the contextual politics of the time and the sexism baked into the sport, and how Polgar\u2019s story raises significant ethical questions about the method behind her rise to prominence \u2013 topics that are addressed, but perhaps not as thoroughly as they likely demand.<\/p>\n
The Gist: Judit Polgar\u2019s father calls it \u201can experiment.\u201d He believed that geniuses are \u201cmade,\u201d not born. So in 1981, Laszlo Polgar pulled his three daughters out of school and trained them to be chess players, studying eight-to-nine hours a day, every day, with no holidays, birthdays or weekends. Judit was five when she began training alongside her older sisters Susan and Sofia. The Polgars were citizens within a totalitarian communist regime in Hungary, and a self-described poor family, but they scraped together enough money to pay outside chess experts to teach their girls, sometimes cycling through three instructors in a single day. Laszlo entered Susan, Sofia and Judit in national tournaments, and watched them mop the floor with graying men in what was then primarily a boy\u2019s chess club. \u201cThe girls had a great time!\u201d he insists now.<\/p>\n
We might question that assertion, but 49-year-old Judit supports it somewhat when she says she liked the \u201cpowerful\u201d feeling she got when she\u2019d win a game. She was six when she began developing her signature aggressive playing style, and making a dent in a competitive arena in which chess superstar Bobby Fischer, when asked why there weren\u2019t more women in the sport, replied, \u201cThey\u2019re just not that smart.\u201d At the time, the Soviet chess movement, both male and female, was dominant internationally, and spawned Garry Kasparov, a brilliant player who surely would identify himself as confident while others called him arrogant. The Polgars had blown through their national competitors and had their sights set on international tournaments, but the Hungarian government didn\u2019t like that the girls were being homeschooled, or the family\u2019s insistence that women were just as good at chess as men. Passports were revoked until the government bowed to pressure and watched as the Polgar girls went to the 1988 Chess Olympiad in Greece and knocked off the Russians. What happened when they came home? State officials praised them as representatives of Hungarian greatness, of course. Hypocrites.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe went from black sheep to golden girls,\u201d Judit says. But among her sisters, Judit stood out: \u201cShe turned opponents into victims,\u201d one commentator gushes. Now that bureaucratic roadblocks had been broken, she quickly became the world\u2019s best female chess player at age 12. In 1991, she beat Fischer\u2019s record of being the youngest chess grandmaster by two months, and won a national championship \u2013 all by making bold moves in a single all-or-nothing match. Of course, Judit idolized Kasparov; he was the Michael Jordan of chess, after all. She had watched him at tournaments, but although the walls between the sexes were slowly eroding, she had yet to play against him.<\/p>\n
Her father pushed the chess establishment to pit her against the world\u2019s best regardless of gender, and eventually, finally, in 1994, Judit sat down across from Kasparov at Linares, \u201cthe Wimbledon of chess.\u201d What happened is legend: the \u201ctouch-move controversy.\u201d Most everyone knows that a move is complete once the player\u2019s hand is no longer touching the chesspiece, but Kasparov broke the rule when he realized he was making a strategic mistake. Nobody noticed but Judit. She didn\u2019t speak up, fearing the blowback. She lost the game, but video footage proved Kasparov\u2019s violation. During the years following, Judit would shed her father\u2019s coaching, get married, learn new strategies, climb the international rankings \u2013 and lose to Kasparov over and over again. She was 0-14 against him. But when she faced him once again in 2002, that 15th match is the one that would truly matter.<\/p>\n
Photo: Netflix<\/p>\n
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Of course, Searching for Bobby Fischer <\/a>and Netflix hit limited series The Queen\u2019s Gambit<\/a> are big ones. But the BOATS (Based On A True Story, of course) drama you should seek out is Queen of Katwe<\/a> (it\u2019s on Disney+, FYI), the overlooked biopic of Ugandan chess star Phiona Mutesi.<\/p>\n Performance Worth Watching: Throughout the documentary, Judit shows significant grace and humility despite her amazing achievements, and maintains an upbeat tone without ever indulging any corny you-go-girl rhetoric \u2013 exactly what a true role model does.<\/p>\n Sex And Skin: None.<\/p>\n Our Take: One of the very last statements we hear in Queen of Chess comes from chess journalist Dirk Jan ten Geuzendam: That she \u201cremains a very normal and pleasant person\u2026 is a miracle.\u201d Laszlo still uses the word \u201cexperiment\u201d to describe his approach to teaching chess to his daughters, a word that\u2019s, well, a bit dehumanizing. Others threw around even less flattering terms like \u201cDaddy Dearest,\u201d \u201cFrankenstein\u201d and \u201cguinea pig.\u201d Laszlo wanted to prove the power of nurture over nature, and his overtures come off as a combination of self-aggrandizement and, seemingly secondarily and tangentially, a form of admirable feminism. To be grossly reductionist: It\u2019s complicated.\u00a0<\/p>\n Kennedy doesn\u2019t dig deep into this though \u2013 perhaps a compromise to lure all the key players, including Laszlo, Kasparov, Sofia and Susan, into participating in the documentary \u2013 tacking on a cursory acknowledgment of the thorny subject matter in the final few minutes. She asks Judit how she feels about her father\u2019s modus operandi, and she pauses for a long time before giving a wishy-washy answer that smacks of diplomacy. The takeaway is, she\u2019s spinning it positive, and that\u2019s understandable, even admirable. Her ability to share her story with composure and self-assurance sure seems to trump Laszlo\u2019s \u201cnurture\u201d with her sense of personal agency. But one question remains unanswered: How\u2019s their relationship today? (To Laszlo\u2019s credit, he acknowledges her independence, although he also implies with a bit of sexism that her husband has greater influence on her now.)<\/p>\n Praise Kennedy for keeping the focus on Judit instead of her patriarch, a trap that other films haven\u2019t avoided \u2013 e.g., King Richard which, for the sake of \u201cdrama\u201d I guess, focused on Richard Williams instead of his far less problematic tennis-champ offspring Venus and Serena Williams. But rather than investigate the tougher throughlines of Judit\u2019s story, Kennedy leans heavily into Judit\u2019s rivalry with Kasparov, which is nonetheless entertaining. Kasparov has toned down some of his braggadocio, but is still slippery about the touch-move controversy, and his tone with regards to Judit\u2019s achievements is about a 60\/40 ratio of appreciation and dismissal. (We also walk away from the film without a firm grip on Judit and Kasparov\u2019s current relationship, if they have one. Maybe they text each other funny chess memes?)<\/p>\n And so we primarily get a Wikipedia-esque tick-tock play-by-play of the most dramatic moments in Judit\u2019s career, with plenty of necessary contextual commentary and archival footage, and just enough pithy explanations of chess strategies and lingo to keep chess newbs in the loop but never in the weeds. Kennedy fills the soundtrack with 1990s riot-grrl rock songs, but otherwise mostly sidesteps feminist cliches. She also finds talking heads to enliven the potentially snoozy third-party descriptions of chess tournaments with color: \u201cHer rooks just started GOBBLING pawns!\u201d chess grandmaster Maurice Ashley declares in his description of Judit\u2019s victory over Kasparov \u2013 not that Judit\u2019s hunger for greatness was ever in doubt.<\/p>\n Our Call: Queen of Chess leaves a few too many rocks unturned to be truly substantive. But as a surface-level summary of Judit\u2019s impressive, inspiring achievements, it works rather well. STREAM IT.<\/p>\n John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Documentary Queen of Chess (now streaming on Netflix) is a biography of women\u2019s chess luminary Judit Polgar, with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":125609,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[8090,2471,47659,9409,9,24,63,122,124,123,47634,319],"class_list":["post-125608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-chess","tag-documentaries","tag-judit-polgar","tag-movie-reviews","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news","tag-rory-kennedy","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125608"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125608\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/125609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} Photo: Courtesy of Netflix<\/p>\n