\tWhy? That one-word question bobs up more than once in \u201cFreediver,\u201d director Michael John Warren\u2019s often fascinating documentary about Alexey Molchanov, a champion in a sport to which audiences may not have given much thought but won\u2019t soon forget.<\/p>\n
\tBased on a piece by Daniel Riley published in GQ magazine in 2021, the movie begins with an explanatory text block that is pretty much verbatim: \u201cThe goal of competitive freediving is simple: go as deep as you can on a single breath and return to the surface without blacking out or dying.\u201d The article mulled the broader human implications of Molchanov\u2019s remarkable breath-holding dives, as well as captured some of the communal bonhomie of Molchanov\u2019s fellow divers. The documentary hews even more closely to Molchanov\u2019s into-the-deep ascendance. \t<\/p>\n
\tAlexey\u2019s mother, Natalia Molchanova, figures mightily \u2014 not just in her son\u2019s backstory but also in the sport itself. A champion swimmer, she and Alexey\u2019s father, Oleg, separated when Alexey was a teen. After their divorce, Natalia didn\u2019t find herself until she discovered freediving in her forties. The film includes excerpts from poems she wrote after this \u201crebirth,\u201d as a relative deemed it. <\/p>\n
\t\t\t \t\t\tPopular on Variety\t\t \t \t\t \t \tIt was a discovery she shared with her son as she began to excel at it. She was a record holder long before Alexey became one. Warren utilizes the story of the mother-and-son bond the way freedivers orient themselves to the main downline as they plunge deeper and deeper.<\/p>\n
\tHome video captures Natalia smiling broadly whether she\u2019s on land or in her wetsuit. In 2015, she vanished while doing a fairly routine dive off the coast of Spain. (Natalia makes a significant albeit posthumous cameo in last year\u2019s equally entrancing documentary \u201cThe Deepest Breath,\u201d about freediver Alessia Zecchini.) Natalia haunts \u201cFreediver,\u201d making it both tender and psychologically absorbing. The film is dedicated to her.<\/p>\n
\tAs for the younger Molchanov\u2019s early years, the film touches on the unsurprising (he was an exceptional swimmer even as a toddler) and the charming: Before the glinting nickname \u201cmachine,\u201d he was called \u201cretriever,\u201d because he was like a puppy around his mother and older divers.<\/p>\n
\tWarren began filming in 2022, the year Alexey was banned from participating in the sport\u2019s vaunted competition called Vertical Blue because of Russia\u2019s war on Ukraine. Sitting in Moscow with his wife, Elena Sokolova, and infant son, Alexey watched as his world records were claimed by other divers. \t<\/p>\n
\tMuch of the documentary\u2019s narrative tension comes from Molchanov\u2019s attempts in 2023 (he was able to compete under a neutral flag) to reclaim those records and a few more by competing in five freediving categories. The 36-year-old sits in a session explaining the rules of each event \u2014 variable weight, monofin, bi-fin free immersion and the most treacherous, no-fins \u2014 his eyes shining, his enthusiasm tugging sweetly. It\u2019s easy to see why he has successfully launched several self-named diving schools and has plans for more.<\/p>\n
\tMolchanov\u2019s quest takes viewers to some of the most frequented yet far-flung sites for the eclectic pod of competitive freedivers, their families and aficionados of the sport: the Bahamas, Nice, the Caribbean island of Bonaire, Honduras. In the Philippines, an approaching typhoon shortens the time he has to achieve one of his goals. His accelerated attempt underscores how dedicated (or is it reckless?) he can be.<\/p>\n
\tThe mix of talking heads and underwater footage (Jeff Louis Peterman\u2019s beckoning cinematography) as well as the occasionally hyped opining about the potential for disaster or triumph delivers the familiar beats of the genre. And yet, \u201cFreediver\u201d has plenty of eloquent flourishes.<\/p>\n
\tScenes from the natural world offer a meditative respite from the competitive fervor, exploring what else has meaning for Alexey: the health of the oceans. Warren and editor Mohammed El Manasterly fashion fragmented and hallucinatory visions that evoke the blurring consciousness divers may experience when they are about to blackout or when they are in a trancelike calm.<\/p>\n
\tWarren even finds something of a nemesis for his hero: William Trubridge. The record holder in no-fin freediving and founder of the Vertical Blue invitational event was instrumental in getting Molchanov barred from competition in 2022. He had his reasons. On camera, Adam Skolnick, author of \u201cOne Breath: Freediving, Death and the Quest to Shatter Human Limits,\u201d points out Trubridge\u2019s seeming conflict of interest: He had held the record for no-fin diving for seven years when Alexey goes after it.<\/p>\n
\tBut in a riff that threatens to cast the viewer out of Alexey\u2019s realm, the sportswriter belittles legitimate moral grappling about sports, nationalism and war. His remarks on the impotence of the gesture pokes the viewers who may have already made the uneasy connection between one Alexey \u2014 moving freely around the globe, returning home to his wife and child in Moscow \u2014 and another Alexei who also starred in a documentary, but seemed to have lived in a very different Russia. It\u2019s a moment that stirs complicated feelings about the hermetically sealed world of the film, and perhaps extreme sports in general. Yet, it doesn\u2019t scuttle this more enduring impression the story of Alexey and Natalia makes.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cFreediver\u201d is now streaming on Prime Video.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Why? That one-word question bobs up more than once in \u201cFreediver,\u201d director Michael John Warren\u2019s often fascinating documentary about Alexey Molchanov, a champion in a sport to which audiences may not have given much thought but won\u2019t soon forget. Based on a piece by Daniel Riley published in GQ magazine in 2021, the movie begins […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":20861,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movie"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20859"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20859\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieetv.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}