In theaters this Wednesday, March 4, the new film by Australian David Michôd traces the life of the first professional female boxer, American Christy Martin, played by actress Sydney Sweeney.
A lesbian boxing champion portrayed by Barbie Sweeney… Curiosity. The Australian director David Michôd, author of Animal Kingdom and The King (on Netflix, with Timothée Chalamet), has dedicated his new film to the biography of American Christy Martin, a pioneer of women’s boxing in the 1990s.
Christy thus follows the ascent of a coal-miner’s daughter born in 1968 in the northeast United States and who became the headlining star of a sport that did not want her. The filmmaker, also author of War Machine, returns to his favorite ground, that of male-dominated universes where violence structures power relations. The athlete’s story had already been the subject of several accounts, notably in The Underbelly of Sport: A Boxer in Hell. But where that Netflix documentary gave the boxer a voice and dissected the domestic violence she endured, the film favors dramaturgy and the making of a legend.
Sydney Sweeney en Barbie butch
On screen, it is therefore Sydney Sweeney who puts on the gloves to navigate the life of the boxer, from the grueling training to underpaid fights, her marriage to a possessive coach, and the crafting of a marketable image. An unexpected choice to portray a precarious butch, the glamorous actress revealed by the series Euphoria before becoming the face with the “good genes” of Trumpist America. Stepping out of her comfort zone, the sexy dreaminess of The White Lotus nonetheless thickens her presence, and the dissonance produces something.
To exist, Christy Martin must first accept the rules of a rigged game. Women’s boxing does not exist; the coaches do not believe in it, the promoters treat aspiring boxers like carnival freaks, so you have to hit hard to succeed. In this regard, the film has nothing to envy from the genre’s classics, from Rocky to Creed, showing technical improvements, weight management, and the excitement of a discipline that is gradually professionalizing. David Michôd does not make his heroine a naive person who endures her condition: the dyke knows what she wants, and makes the conscious choice of the closet into which her family and the homophobia she internalized steer her. In this cover marriage, she must then survive domestic violence.
The question of image runs through the entire narrative, installing a constant tension between showroom and authenticity. On screen, Christy is an openly self-identified butch, with a functional and muscular body, far from the sculpted and lean physiques of today’s athletes. Off the ring, there is a rush to feminize her in the eyes of mainstream, heteropatriarchal America. One thinks of the very image of Sydney Sweeney, and the imposed feminine archetypes jostle in echoes in this film that keeps you hooked from start to finish.
