Race for Glory: parade of spectacular cars, but without sense or purpose | Review

Race for Glory comes in the wake of other recent dramatizations of sports motorsport stories, Rush by Ron Howard, about ten years ago, Le Mans ’66: the Duel by James Mangold or the Ferrari by Michael Mann. Unfortunately, looking at any of these examples, it looks like a counterfeit product.

The story was potentially good (and there are still many good stories about car racing to tell), especially due to its dive into the rallies of the early 80s, at a time when the interest of the big brands (Audi and Lancia, in this case ) the sport began to generate a kind of arms race that would result in progressively more powerful and unsafe cars, causing several tragedies (until the disastrous year of 1986, when the International Automobile Federation was forced to put an end to the climbing).

In Stefano Mordini’s film, the focus is only on the year 1983, on monitoring that year’s World Rally Championship, and on the duel between the Italians from Lancia and the Germans from Audi. But the dramaturgy is so gray that it wastes the very symbolic properties that the film clumsily enunciates: the traditionalism of Lancia against the technological modernity of Audi, the Italian “cleverness” against the cold pragmatism of the Germans.

The inability to create a conflict, to attribute to the duel a symbolism that goes beyond the mere sporting issue, is a serious problem with the film, which also has consequences at the level of the characters: the protagonist (the legendary Cesare Fiorio, director of the Lancia team, played by Riccardo Scamarcio) spends his time in anguish, but there is no superlative reason for this anguish, nor does his story come close to the personal abysses that Michael Mann conceived for his Enzo Ferrari.

The characters of the pilots are wasted, mere silhouettes with no real existence (and once again there was raw material: from Walter Röhrl, the brilliant and idiosyncratic German, to Hannu Mikkola, the toughest of the “flying Finns”, evidently going through Michèle Mouton, the most dramatic case of the indifference with which Mordini’s film treats its subjects and objects).

Very quickly the film becomes a parade of spectacular cars, but without sense or purpose (it doesn’t even get to be “fetishistic”, so lacking in ideas, so lacking in “looking” that it is), and absolutely nothing more than that. Seeing the Lancia 037 and Audi Quattro leaving the museum for a “last hurray” is the only conceivable reason to go see this film, but there are still hundreds of clips on YouTube that fulfill the nostalgic function much better.