Throw a rock at the sports genre and you'll hit a film about baseball or football, or hockey, or racing. Odds are, you won't strike a film about chess. Chess isn't generally considered a stadium filler (although it can be). It's perceived as a game for eccentric intellectuals and elderly historians. It doesn't have the glamour or sex appeal of more sedentary sports, such as pool, as demonstrated by Paul Newman in The Hustler. Chess won't even fit snugly in to other genre films, where the banality of cards, for example, naturally lends itself to a seedy, gambling gangster underworld (Rounders), the exotic highlife of a casino (Casino Royale), or even more piquant, a combo of the two (Ocean's Eleven). But chess? It's just too uncool, and Computer Chess only serves to compound that.
In cinemas this week, Computer Chess is the latest feature from mumblecore pioneer, director Andrew Bujalski, his first since Beeswax, in 2009. It's a fly on the wall, almost mockumentary-style dry comedy, following a computer chess tournament as it unfolds over a weekend. It could have been a proud starring role for the game, a film for the Magnus Carlsen era (the young prodigy and new World Champion described as the Harry Potter of the sport). Alas, neither the game nor the players are shown in a particularly endearing light. Sadly, this seems to be the fate of chess throughout the course of cinema.
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Chess doesn't lend itself to the physicality of the movies, least of all blockbusters. On the seldom occasions it makes an appearance, it is usually merely a prop to emphasise intellect or cunning, or as a material analogy to illustrate a scheming mind. Take the classic example of Blade Runner, in which a battle of wits between Roy Batty and Dr Eldon Tyrell plays out by remote across a chessboard. It's a pivotal scene, and the moment Tyrell succumbs to defeat by unintentionally welcoming Batty in to his private quarters. But how does it translate to film?
"Queen to bishop six, check," is the initial attack.
"Knight takes queen," the retort.
The final blow: "Bishop to king seven. Checkmate."
As Tyrell himself articulates: "Nonsense."
And sadly, to the vast majority of viewers, it most likely is. Chess enthusiasts might correctly identify this sequence from the Immortal Game, played by Anderssen v Kieseritzky in London in 1851.
Similarly, Guy Ritchie weaves a nail-biting game of chess into the climax of Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, an on-the-nose metaphor for the action taking place, although Moriarty does offer some exposition for any audience members still confused by the moves: "May I remind you this is blitz chess – a single miscalculation will cost you the game."
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Sometimes, however, it is courtship, not a battle. In The Thomas Crown Affair an extended chess encounter between the two protagonists is thick with sexual tension. To the uninitiated, an early castling by Crown probably looks foolish, but the chess is merely a backdrop for the sultry Vicki Anderson to flash a little side cleavage and raise the temperature. Indeed, Thomas Crown is shown to be distinctly hot under the collar, and ultimately the game ends off the board, with checkmate between the sheets … (Incidentally, this scene is hilariously parodied in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me)
One of the difficulties for directors is to convey on film the momentous significance of movements on the board. Even for amateurs, but especially for the layman, easily visualising a chessboard is a rare ability, and a failure to visualise – let alone comprehend and interpret the positional strengths of the pieces – means any subtle shift in the power play is lost. In most other sports, a simple cutaway to the scoreboard telegraphs the balance of the game; and the actions of the players (netting goals, batting sixes or whatever) demonstrates the strength of one team or player over the other. The inability to portray chess in the same tangible fashion is doubtless one reason it's so often shirked by film-makers.
Perhaps this is why one of the most successful integrations of chess within film is actually in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, where JK Rowling placed the characters on a giant board, and where a wrong move results in destruction and sacrifice. It is concrete, visceral and accessible – not to mention wonderfully realised by director Chris Columbus.
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None of this is to say that films using chess as their primary focus haven't been attempted. European cinema has produced many engaging pictures. Back in 1925, the silent Soviet Union short comedy Chess Fever starred the chess world champion José Raúl Capablanca, among cameos from other famed players, and in 1957, Bergman's The Seventh Seal saw the ultimate chess game as a man plays the grim reaper. Switzerland has comedy Ivory Tower (2010), France has The Chess Player (1927) and Dangerous Moves (1984). The Netherlands produced Long Live the Queen (1995), a beautifully poignant fairy tale, while Germany crafted Three Moves to Freedom (1960).
In English language cinema, however, chess films are few and far between and, for the most part, woefully underwhelming. Probably the most successful and certainly the most straightforward sports drama, Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993), is excellent, touching and well acted, charting the development of chess whizz Josh Waitzkin from anonymity to acclaim. It's an anomaly in film – a triumphant display, easily rivaling other sport biopics, where chess really is the centrepiece. A year later and a few rungs down the ladder hangs Fresh, in which a drug runner and prodigy chess player apply the game's tactics to find an edge in the real world. It's an enthralling movie, and the inclusion of chess is certainly more than perfunctory, but it nonetheless takes a backseat to drug dealing. And would a real chess film make the grievous error of messing up the gameplay? Escaping a check with another check is an invalid move!
In addition to Searching and Fresh, the 90s saw a spate of substandard crime thrillers, each seeking to portray a sinister side to chess. Knight Moves (not to be confused with the decent 1975 Gene Hackman crime thriller, Night Moves) arrived in 1992, and was an overly sincere attempt to entwine the game with a serial killer noir. Unsurprisingly, sauciness and chess isn't confined to The Thomas Crown Affair. Indeed, sex and chess seems to be a persistent theme, the former being the one reliable antidote to all things deemed too dull for audience viewing. Between passionate bouts of intercourse, Knight Moves explores the egos behind chess, suggesting high intelligence and mentally deranged psychopaths are par for the course. In doing so, it strips aside the significance of the game's setting, and ultimately draws on the same box of tricks as every other psycho-killer thriller.
Perhaps taking cues from the latter, director Jim McBride unleashed Uncovered, a film that makes every effort to prove that chess goes hand in hand with crime and intrigue, where the chess pieces are the clues to murder and are taken entirely literally, knight for knight, castle for castle. Release in 1994, it's unbelievably bad, but speaks volumes of the attempts to sex up chess for public consumption. An utterly bizarre sexual undercurrent throughout, way beyond ordinary 90s smut, includes one memorable scene in which lead actress Kate Beckinsale, 19 at the time, is reflected fully naked in the chessboard, her breasts literally overlaid upon the pieces. It doesn't get any more obvious than that: chess can be sexy! It's vexing because it could have been good, but Knight Moves is stylistically closer to an X-rated episode of Miss Marple than Se7en.
Then there was The Luzhin Defence, in 2000, a chess romance and adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's The Defense, a novel loosely based on German chess master Curt von Bardeleben. The film is less to do with chess than with social distinctions and improprieties, with John Turturro's character, Aleksandr Luzhin, socially dysfunctional, scruffy and stammering. He's practically damaged by his genius, deliberately painted as an oddity. By association, chess is tarred with the same brush, as the domain of weirdos.
More than a decade on and despite tackling a different genre, Computer Chess, unfortunately, isn't really any different, mumblecore or nay. The comic basis for the film is the social awkwardness and idiosyncracies of chess and programming enthusiasts. I'm not convinced that the mockery of these nerdy individuals is affectionate, or if it further reinforces the misplaced perception that chess is just the horseplay of freaks and geeks. In fact, that unfamiliar, oddball environment appears to be precisely the attraction for the director: "Given the nature of the story in Computer Chess and what we were trying to do, there was no imperative at all to be tasteful," Bujalski told the New Statesman. "We could be as absurd as we liked and call as much attention to ourselves as we liked." Oh, and it also features full frontal nudity (albeit in a uniquely surreal fashion).
Films like Computer Chess don't do the game any favours, appealing to a niche within a niche and further estranging those who were already skeptical or disinterested. If chess is ever to reach a wider audience and greater popularity, it'll need something considerably more compelling to stack the board in its favour. Maybe it's true that board games really aren't spectator sports, but I can't help but think that we can do better than this. There's a better endgame out there.
• Peter Bradshaw's review of Computer Chess
• Computer Chess: watch the trailer
