The Last Victory (2004)

Directed by: John Appel | 88 minutes | documentary | Actors: Egidio Mecacci, Paolo Rossi, Alma Savini, Roberto Papei, Camilla Marzucchi, Alessandro Calderan

The telling subtitle of this dramatized documentary is “ten horses and eighty seconds of solitude”. The annual horse race lasts only eighty seconds – three laps around the main square. For the residents of Siena’s ten neighborhoods, it’s blood-curdling seconds when they seem to lose a year of their life expectancy. The film opens with an old black-and-white film report from the last century in which the horse of the Civetta neighborhood (‘Owl’) won the race. It’s a beautiful shot, taken from the high tower on the square, with passionately screaming commentary from the reporter. The square is so small that horses swerve, knock each other sideways, crash into facades and the jockeys are almost thrown into the frenzied crowd. Goosebumps!

The Dutch filmmaker John Appel managed to talk into the closed community of the Civetta district and followed the ups and downs of these people in the run-up to the Palio in 2003. For several months, the camera mainly follows three residents, whom Appel without comment. follows and lets speak. He is familiar with this method. He previously made the very successful documentary ‘André Hazes – she believes in me’, with which he won the Joris Ivens Award in 1999. Knowing how to penetrate deeply into people’s personal lives, with their ups and downs, is a great credit to Appel. In ‘The Last Victory’ he was less successful in this than with André Hazes. The community of Civetta, a somewhat illustrious ‘second family’ according to good Italian custom, turned out to be much more closed than expected. The resident most exposed is old neighborhood pastor Egidio, but even he dodges the camera and microphone just before the race. The Last Victory nevertheless manages to captivate because it skilfully transfers the unbearably rising tension before the race to the unsuspecting viewer. It is also an interesting anthropological study (even an anthropologist was consulted in the preparation) about the Italian culture and that of Siena in particular. It is bizarre to witness how the friendly tourist town turns in on itself for a few weeks a year, wards off snoopers and unleashes a true war between the neighborhoods. The horse race is the climax of this. That climax has become an almost casually filmed sideshow in ‘The Last Victory’.

Like many documentaries, this one is of the impressionistic kind. The camera registers striking images, people speak their hearts out, the atmosphere is dreamy and is now and then supported by melancholy music. The lack of an explanatory voiceover sucks the viewer completely into Siena’s life, but at the same time leaves crucial questions unanswered. You would sometimes want to know more about the backgrounds of the Palio, things that the filmed people clearly do not want to report, such as the role of bribes in the outcome of the race…