Slalom

Once inside a pro­fes­sion­al envi­ron­ment, many believe they are afford­ed cer­tain pass­es when it comes to how they treat their peers. Mon­ey, suc­cess, rep­u­ta­tion are all on the line, so voic­es can be raised, humil­i­a­tions can be admin­is­tered, and pow­er can be asserted.

Jérémie Renier plays Fred, a ski instruc­tor and one-time slalom whiz who puts his pupils through the ringer: his tough­ness is a reflec­tion of his hunger to win; his mat­ter-of-fact treat­ment of per­son­al inti­ma­cies a sign that he expects those he’s teach­ing to join him in his fer­vent quest for victory.

The man­ner in which direc­tor Char­lène Favier cap­tures Fred’s first pri­vate meet­ing with promis­ing 15-year-old Lyz Lopez (Noée Abi­ta) fore­shad­ows a future of tor­ment and con­fu­sion, even if the cold bureau­cra­cy of the sit­u­a­tion is ini­tial­ly pushed to the fore. Lyz enters the room and Fred asks her to strip so he can weigh her. He seems irri­tat­ed by her hes­i­tan­cy. He touch­es her with­out per­mis­sion, grab­bing at her stom­ach and telling her she needs to lose weight to be a cham­pi­on. Lyz doesn’t mind as this, she sees, is the price of success.

Even though Lyz doesn’t dis­play the dri­ve or hunger of a cham­pi­on, she ends up being one, sur­pris­ing both Fred and her fel­low team mem­bers with dis­plays that prove she’s hap­py to take risks on the slopes. Not long after that, Fred is treat­ing his new tal­is­man a lit­tle dif­fer­ent­ly. He’s quick to claim vic­to­ry for him­self as the mas­ter train­er, but also decides he wants to become clos­er with his inex­pe­ri­enced charge.

In its con­ven­tion­al­ly-timed nar­ra­tive beats, Slalom is noth­ing if not hor­ri­bly pre­dictable, as Lyz must con­tend with Fred’s con­trived Jekyll and Hyde act, as he rejects her and insults her in one breath, and rav­ish­es her with anoth­er. Even though Fred is paint­ed as a nar­cis­sist and a creep (fair­ly text­book stuff for Renier), Favier doesn’t frame Lyz as a pas­sive vic­tim, and the film takes time to hear out her jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for pro­long­ing what is, from the per­spec­tive of an objec­tive observ­er, a deeply trau­ma­tis­ing sit­u­a­tion. Is manip­u­la­tion and abuse real­ly what it takes to be a winner?

Though the film prizes a cer­tain lev­el of ambi­gu­i­ty rather than going full genre and turn­ing Fred into a big, bad wolf, there’s ten­sion in indi­vid­ual moments, more relat­ed to the fact that Lyz must make split-sec­ond life deci­sions as Fred applies the pres­sure. A sequence where the pair are alone in the gym, sym­bol­i­cal­ly bathed in red lights, is excru­ci­at­ing in the way that it cap­tures a key moment and then remains in the room to doc­u­ment its depress­ing aftermath.

For­mal­ly, there’s noth­ing to write home about here, but it’s a very suc­cess­ful and nuanced study of how abuse can become an ambi­ent feel­ing in the head of an abuser when it’s hap­pen­ing with­in a cer­tain social context.