Review: Slalom Is a Nuanced Look at the Dynamics of an Abusive Relationship

The hoary trope of a former pro athlete, never having reached their ideal summit of excellence, channeling their frustrations and feelings of inadequacy into a coaching career is given psychosexual shading in Charlène Favier’s Slalom, a study of workplace abuse set in the French alpine skiing community. Instead of centering her story on such a turbulent has-been, though, the filmmakers express their insights into this all-too-common pathology by directing their attention to one of its victims: wunderkind racer Lyz Lopez (Noée Abita), whose high-pressure athletic regiment as a first-year recruit to a prestigious racing academy is depicted with a lucidity that suggests a lived-in understanding of alpine skiing and its culture. Shot in anamorphic widescreen, the film reflects the grandiosity of Lyz’s milieu while also emphasizing her smallness within it; it’s less a story about climbing to new peaks of achievement, which comes rather naturally for Lyz given her preternatural ability, than about the hazards that exist regardless of however many summits are scaled.

Immediately apparent in Slalom is the dynamic beauty of the racing/training scenes in the mountains of Val d’Isère where Favier was raised, often captured by a camera that hurtles down the slopes at the vertiginous pace of the racers, viscerally embodying both the thrill and isolation of the activity. This same mixture of emotions informs the trajectory of the film’s embattled heroine, whose skill level demonstrates her Olympic potential but whose lack of a reliable support system—her preoccupied mother (Muriel Combeau) works in the city and her father is portentously out of the picture—makes her an ideal target for the manipulative tactics of overzealous taskmaster Fred (Jérémie Renier). In Slalom’s first act, a patina of Dardennes-like social realism—affected through a handheld camera that clings constantly to Lyz—aims to disguise the formulaic nature of the dramatic groundwork, while a somber cello-heavy score effectively does the opposite, telegraphing the latent unease coursing through such scenes as Lyz undergoes a handsy weight inspection courtesy of her trainer.

Once the familiar dynamics of the scenario are established, though, the relative predictability of what plays out is counterbalanced by a fair degree of nuance in the execution. The 15-year-old Lyz’s quest for athletic success is framed as an outgrowth of her larger pursuit of womanhood. Despite initial reluctance in the face of Fred’s bullish coaching style, a commanding early victory in a qualifying race enables the girl to see this most independent of competitive sports as a promising path toward a more evolved self—in turn giving Fred a window to insidiously assert his power over her. In an elegant shot early on that encapsulates Lyz’s false sense of control over her own destiny, Lyz and a fellow racer, Justine (Maïra Schmitt), lie down in a pile of snow, blissfully passing around a joint while a plow grooms the terrain behind them; the shot is held long enough to create the impression that the plowman might absentmindedly run right over the two vulnerable young women.

This sense of impending catastrophe hangs thick in the alpine air as Fred begins directing undue attention on his preferred trainee—special treatment that Lyz initially assumes comes from a place of sincere belief in her potential. But Fred’s motives are clear to the viewer, and it’s more than a bit unnerving to watch him clinically prey on his object of desire’s misunderstanding of their dynamic, passing off such violating language as “we’ll adapt your training to your menstrual cycle” as the wisdom of a seasoned expert. Nevertheless, the film stops short of painting Fred as an uncomplicated monster. After his first sexual attack in a parking lot, smartly staged at the end of a scene depicting automotive tomfoolery that he tailors to encourage physical contact, Fred’s demeanor adopts a palpable sense of shame. Renier’s hangdog physicality and noncommittal eye contact are the unambiguous expressions of a man who knows what he’s done is wrong but feels compelled to repeat his actions anyway.

While the erratic nature of Fred’s behavior following his initial transgression suggests a filmmaker deeply considering the internal turmoil of an abuser, Lyz remains the visual and empathetic center of Slalom. In the aforementioned scene and the subsequent rape—which occurs in an empty gym bathed in hellish red light—Favier resists exploitative cutting in favor of lingering on Lyz’s face as she processes a mix of shock, anger, confusion, and, against her better judgment, pleasure. The film’s real subject isn’t Lyz’s rise to skiing glory but her awakening to her oppression, an emergence of consciousness that’s rendered poignant in all its awkwardness by Abita, who allows her character’s epiphanies to emerge largely without words. Like many of the film’s narrative beats, the scene that crystallizes Lyz’s Road-to-Damascus moment feels a bit pre-packaged in its triumphant definitiveness, but Abita’s performance, and the discreetness of the camerawork, gives it weight and conviction.