The Last Fight (2018)

Directed by: Victor Vroegindeweij | 70 minutes | documentary | With: Marloes Coenen | Voice over: Bruce Dern

In ‘The Last Fight’ (2018) we follow mixed martial arts (MMA) star Marloes Coenen as she faces the final challenge of her long career in martial arts. The challenge to make another big hit and say goodbye with dignity. She is thirty-five years old, her body is said to be exhausted, and her biological clock is ticking louder and louder. For twenty years she has put everything aside for her métier, everything revolved around beating and receiving blows. She can hardly imagine a life without the dance of battle. Director Victor Vroegindeweij sees similarities with religious fanatics in her passion and the world of MMA. It is a way of giving meaning; intensifying life to mask the apparent meaninglessness of life. She can hardly imagine a life outside the ring and is afraid of the emptiness that lies ahead. But going on any longer is out of the question; the cake is finished.

As usual in the genre, ‘The Last Fight’ features a countdown to the big day with intertitles. Until then, we see Coenen training a lot. Training and listening to trainers. Confident advice from trainer Martijn de Jong, and worried words from her trainer and partner Roemer Trompert, and the vague posturing of energetic therapist and mental coach Leon Bemelmans, who mispredicted the outcomes of the two fights with a kind of tarot cards. If we have to go by ‘The Last Fight’ then the world of a top athlete, at least Coenen’s, is not much bigger than this.

Endless training until you are devastated, and then be urged to continue anyway. She eats an egg sandwich at her parents’ house, sits on a sports show with garish enthusiasm, or waits in her hotel room for the moment it’s all about.

Early indeweij films all this from a distance and asks few questions. The deepening is in the voice-over by Bruce Dern, who mythologizes Coenen’s swan song with a Marlboro Man timbre. His voice fits very nicely with the American images of deserts, highways and hotels, but sounds a bit nonsensical next to the other Dutch speakers. The almost fairytale-like text contrasts pleasantly with the Dutch sobriety. Yet it feels as if Vroegindeweij is trying to camouflage the lack of truly remarkable and defining scenes with this artifice.