Hudson: Chariots of Fire (1981)

Unabashedly nostalgic and sentimental, Chariots of Fire tells the true story of two British runners at the 1924 Olympics – Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson), a Scottish Christian, and Harold Abrahams (Ben Cross), an English Jew. Whereas Liddell runs for God, Abrahams runs to overcome prejudice, with the aid of his irascible trainer, played by Ian Holm – and, while that all sounds very sympathetic on paper, the film tends to reserve its most transcendent, breathtaking moments for Liddell, while Abrahams’ cause is often collapsed into a more earthbound competitiveness. In any case, the tension between Christian and Jew is more or less subsumed into the tension between England and Scotland anyway – a tension that’s over before its begun, thanks to the sheer scope of the film’s Anglophilic ambition, as well as the depth of its nostalgia for sport as a quintessence of English etiquette. What does set the film apart then, and provide it with some much needed tension, are its depictions of running itself, which have probably never been bettered. In Hudson’s hands, Liddell, Abrahams and the entire British team don’t run across landscapes so much as bring landscapes into being – for them, running becomes a way of envisaging a new world, a world that’s so fleeting and visionary that it requires the utmost speed to keep up with it, even as it eludes total visualisation. As a result, the vistas that emerge around the runners feel quite synthetic and incorporeal, just as the cultivated compositions are always hovering on the verge of abstraction. Running here is both a visual sport, driven by such singularity of purpose that it envisages victory into existence, and a futuristic sport, an activity in which the future becomes peculiarly available and malleable. Perhaps that's why Vangelis’ iconic score works so well, and feels more foundational to the film than the direction or cinematography - as with Gallipoli, his montage sequences function semi-autonomously, as miniature works unto themselves. And from the moment his soundscape is introduced, against the backdrop of an astral beach, it accelerates the runners into a future that still hasn't arrived, transforming what could have been the most staid nostalgia film into a haunting, retro-futurist period drama.