Borg vs McEnroe

Janus Metz came to Borg vs McEnroe from documentary. His Armadillo had won the Critics' Week Grand Prize at Cannes in 2010, and he had since directed an episode of True Detective. This Swedish–Danish–Finnish production, his first fiction feature, opened the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival, and at the Guldbagge Awards it took nine nominations, including Best Film and Best Director.

The film is built around the 1980 Wimbledon fortnight. Björn Borg, four titles into an unbroken run and treated in Sweden as a national monument, is chasing a fifth; John McEnroe, twenty-one and notorious for his outbursts, arrives as the challenger. Ronnie Sandahl's screenplay cuts back to the boyhoods that shaped each man, with Borg's own son Leo playing him as a teenager. Sverrir Gudnason makes Borg's calm look like a lid pressed down on something volatile, and Shia LaBeouf plays McEnroe close to his own public image. Stellan Skarsgård, as the coach Lennart Bergelin, won the Guldbagge for Best Supporting Actor. Niels Thastum shoots the tennis tight on the body, and the court scenes were filmed in Prague.

The film's argument is that the two rivals were less opposed than the tabloids of the day insisted: the ice and the fire were two responses to the same pressure. It sits in a Nordic line of sports cinema that cares more about temperament than trophies, and it launched Metz on a run of high-end television, most recently episodes of Andor.