As Robert Towne's directorial debut, Personal Best is anything but safe. His commitment to realism is impressive, but the results can be maudlin and melodramatic. This is also a very fleshy/horny film, and at times, it is hard to tell whether the film's rampant nudity is naturalistic, gratuitous, perverted, raw, or an amalgamation of all these qualities. Regardless of how one perceives the film's gaze (which, from reading reviews, is quite polarizing), Personal Best definitely seeks to deglamorize the female body to show its unvarnished beauty, prowess, and athleticism. And it does so with ambitious technical merit. From isolating a drip of water in a sauna, to accentuating the banality of physical exertion by shooting the film in hard/flat images, to creating leitmotifs with car ignitions, there are layers of meaning to every shot.
With so much subtext and subtle experimentation, it absolutely deserves its slot in the Criterion Collection and is equally worthy of a lengthy conversation, as we give it here. Moreover, for anyone studying representations of gender in film, Personal Best can easily be considered a seminal and groundbreaking work (Ebert and Kael, among others, championed it with glowing reviews about its authentic treatment, through style and substance, of femininity and passion). But as a modern viewer, it can feel dated and dry -- despite all the sweat and tears dripping off the screen.
Because of our ambivalence to the film -- simultaneously impressive and unmoved -- our dialectic runs in curious circles on this episode, trying to reconcile the contradictions with mixed results. It may not be our personal best, but it is definitely one of our most unique episodes yet.
Enjoy!
