Chess Queen Review – How the Greatest Female Player of All Time Defeated the Sexual Establishment | television

Cudit Polgár won her first chess tournament in 1981 when, at the age of six, she sabotaged a group of middle-aged Hungarians and beat Boris Diplomat’s stately Bd-1 electronic chess computer. “I was a killer,” the affable 49-year-old says in the Netflix documentary “The Chess Queen.” “I wanted to kill my opponents. I would sacrifice everything to get checkmate.” Archive footage captures the bloody aftermath of Bulgar’s opening victory. A room full of imposingly dressed victims looked on, in awe and amazement, as the defeated Hungarian scowled at photographers from beneath a bowl cut that could confidently be described as “ferocious.” This victory put an end (at least temporarily) to Polgar’s painful shyness, making her feel “extraordinarily strong. After that, it was very clear to me that I was going to become a chess player. And if you want to be the best,” she says with a wry smile, “it is very important to face challenges.”

Oh yes. Challenges. But which one do you start with? The Chess Queen – a passionate novel about the life of the greatest female chess player of all time – is spoiled for choice. There is the punitive chess training system, which was designed as an experiment conducted by Laszlo, the educational psychologist, Polgár’s father, to prove that “geniuses are made, not born.” (Schools and weekends were banned, so “every day was a workday.”) And there is the communist regime that threatens the family’s ambitions to compete in the West with their passports. There is the relentless sexism that follows the young major and the chess-playing older sisters Susan and Sophia, who are outraged at the recklessness of their insistence on taking on the grandmasters of the male-dominated sport while declaring that “women lack the pure mental capacity necessary to understand the diversity of chess.” It’s all here, and the Chess Queen opens her arms wide in an attempt to capture the frequently depressing reality of Polgár’s experiences. Not wide enough, though. Throughout the documentary’s 90 minutes there is a constant sense that there is more to Polgár’s story; That if Emmy Award-winning director Rory Kennedy had been more consistent with a magnifying glass, the results might not have been so emotionally lagging. Instead, we get a garish, moody account of the young Polgár’s rise to chess stardom, with deranged scenes of strategic prowess accompanied by jarring neon graphics and an aggressively disturbing soundtrack by various types of female-fronted post-punk.

However, at its core lies the rivalry between Polgár and revered former world champion Garry Kasparov.

“The way I played chess was not compatible with the best way to deal with Garry Kasparov,” the Russian grandmaster murmured, flapping his meaty claw dismissively. In the end, however, it was that way: after 14 tense matches (the most famous of which, in 1994, saw Kasparov violate the “touch action” rule), Polgar finally, at the age of 26, defeated her idol. At the time, the Russian greeted the record achievement with a staccato handshake. And now? “You delivered,” he harrumphs.

“I had to prove myself 10 times more than if I had been born as a boy,” says Polgár with the wearyness of one who has long understood that no matter how impressive her accomplishments are, they will never be enough for some.

Enter, sigh, Laszlo Polgár. “I never scolded [the girls] For not winning the match. Still, losing is too bad,” said the battle-bearded septuagenarian, who slumped in his huge chair like a dismounted lion.

Only in her dying moments does the chess queen address the complexity of Judit’s relationship with her father. “How do you feel about being the subject of that experience?” Kennedy asks. He laughed uncomfortably, then silence. Polgar’s gaze turns away. “Of course, on the one hand, this is not a nice way to be part of the experience,” she says, with moist eyes, during a montage of clipped early triumphs. “But it was my father who showed me the beauty of chess…” she continues, before wandering into a jungle of platitudes about self-improvement.

“Judit Polgár was the guinea pig,” says one contributor. “The fact that she’s achieved all these things her father dreamed of and is still such a normal, interesting person is… kind of a miracle.”

That’s not, as you might think, the half of it.