Russia (bbabo.net), - On December 30, the drama "World Champion" about a tense fight for the title of world chess champion in 1978 between Anatoly Karpov and Viktor Korchnoi will be released. The main roles were played by the stars of Russian cinema Konstantin Khabensky and Ivan Yankovsky. Film expert, founder and editor-in-chief of the magazine "KinoReporter" Maria Lemesheva explained why the new film will be interesting not only for chess fans:
“Following Legend No. 17 and Moving Up, Nikita Mikhalkov's studio TRITE continues its own tradition of filming high-quality and popular movie dramas based on the outstanding victories of Russian sports. This time the plot is centered on the legendary match for the world chess crown 1978 years between the Soviet grandmaster Anatoly Karpov and Viktor Korchnoi, who emigrated from the USSR to Switzerland.
But the focus is not on the sports component, but on the fate of great people, their characters with all their strengths and weaknesses. The new film is not a biopic about Anatoly Karpov and Viktor Korchnoi, but a filmmaker of two personalities, each of whom is worthy of a separate picture in itself. Feelings, thoughts, fears, doubts of the two grandmasters, the clash of their worldviews are important for the authors.
It is worth remembering that 36 years ago, a film about this match had already thundered in world cinema. The French-Swiss-Luxembourgish drama Diagonal of the Elephant won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. In that film, the names and surnames of the grandmasters were changed, and the plot was based on dirty games outside the chessboard, when an insolent defector was trying to mentally crush a Soviet grandmaster with poor health.
But the creators of "World Champion" are not interested in behind-the-scenes intrigues, although, perhaps, they took place in reality. This is a life drama, a battle of the greatest minds and mysterious souls of Karpov and Korchnoi. Even Korchnoi's flight from the USSR is presented in the new film not as a betrayal, but as a desire to realize himself outside the country. For him, chess is a war, and in the game he is used to behaving like a fighter on the battlefield. And for the young prodigy Karpov, who defended the world title, the match turned into excruciating torture. He was under pressure from all sides: the Soviet government, the provocations of the Americans, the hostility of Korchnoi, but Karpov, who was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, held out and won the victory, ignoring the political significance of the match and focusing on pure play. "
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