A look at memorable chess-themed movies and TV shows over the years

Chess is the flavour of the season in Chennai as the metropolis hosts the 44th Chess Olympiad. With all people from Viswanathan Anand to A.R. Rahman on the town for the extravagant sporting affair, and chess lovers from round the world glued in to the proceedings, now’s a very good time to look at some memorable chess-themed movies and TV shows over the years.

What’s fascinating to me is the vary of narrative functions fulfilled by the chess movie — clearly, due to the nature of the recreation itself, it has been used as a stand-in for warfare and different prerogatives of the nation state. But the recreation has confirmed to be a flexible instrument in the fingers of expert filmmakers. Chess in movies has additionally symbolised, at numerous locations, statecraft, ambition, decadence, upward mobility, and so on. Perhaps the greatest and most high-stakes chess recreation in cinema, in fact, occurred in 1957, in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, the place disillusioned 14th century knight Antonius Block (Max von Sydow) performs a recreation of chess with Death himself.

Satyajit Ray’s ‘Shatranj…’

For Indian audiences, Satyajit Ray’s Shatranj Ke Khiladi (1977), based mostly on the Premchand quick story of the similar title, is the best-known movie involving chess. Shatranj Ke Khiladi (out there on Amazon Prime Video) is about in 1856, on the eve of the first organised Indian rebellion towards the colonial British administration. As the British use quite a lot of underhand techniques to annexe numerous princely states throughout the nation, we see two wealthy, bored noblemen (performed by Saeed Jaffrey and Sanjeev Kumar) taking part in their each day video games of chess. Here, chess is a stand-in for decadence, particularly the type displayed by the rulers of medieval India. In the previous, some historians have claimed (though this was by no means definitively confirmed) that in the 15th century, some kings in India performed ‘human chess’, with orderlies standing in for the black and white items.

In Satyajit Ray’s ‘Shatranj Ke Khiladi’ (1977), chess is a stand-in for decadence, particularly the type displayed by the rulers of medieval India.

Modern-day Hollywood movies, in fact, have shifted the symbolism from kingly decadence to the form of narrative tensions distinctive to nation-state politics. 2014’s Pawn Sacrifice (out there on Amazon Prime Video), for example, featured Tobey Maguire as legendary American participant Bobby Fischer, who challenged and defeated the high Soviet gamers of the period throughout the peak of the Cold War. The most notable amongst Fischer’s triumphs kinds the climax of the film — the 1972 World Chess Championship match towards the incumbent World Champion, the Soviet grandmaster Boris Spassky (performed by Liev Schreiber).

One of the massive story arcs in the movie adopted the symbolic nature of this U.S. vs. Soviet Union conflict — Spassky’s standing as World Champion was used as a propaganda instrument by the USSR, and so we see President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger following the younger Fischer’s growth as a participant. As the movie’s director Edward Zwick ( American History X, Blood Diamond) defined in a 2017 interview with Screen Prism, “You have Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon calling Bobby Fischer, you have Brezhnev and the KGB agents following Boris Spassky. Both of these men were pawns for their nations.” The real-life Fischer, in fact, turned a fugitive after defeating Spassky in an unofficial rematch held in 1992 in Yugoslavia, which was then a rustic on which the American authorities had imposed numerous political and financial sanctions.

Rising above circumstances

If chess can symbolise political imperatives, it’s each bit as efficient as a stand-in for private and socio-political aspiration, as Mira Nair’s movie Queen of Katwe shows. This 2016 biographical drama based mostly on the lifetime of Ugandan chess participant Phiona Mutesi, follows Mutesi as a younger lady residing in Katwe, a slum in Kampala (capital of Uganda). Chess for her is a means of rising above the circumstances and so each recreation assumes a further layer of urgency for her, her household and the viewers, in fact.

A nonetheless from Mira Nair’s ‘Queen of Katwe’, based mostly on the lifetime of Ugandan chess participant Phiona Mutesi.

Anya Taylor-Joy as Beth Harmon, a gifted younger chess participant, in Netflix miniseries ‘The Queen’s Gambit’. 

Easily the most interesting and the most celebrated chess story of the trendy period, nevertheless, is Netflix’s much-loved miniseries The Queen’s Gambit, based mostly on the Walter Tevis novel of the similar title. Anya Taylor-Joy stars as Beth Harmon, a gifted younger chess participant combating a dependence on alcohol and tranquilizer tablets, which assist her visualise video games and keep a step forward of extra skilled opponents. Among different issues, The Queen’s Gambit did an excellent job of bringing out the darkish aspect of the recreation and the stress-related toll it usually takes on younger gamers. In Pawn Sacrifice, too, for example, an endnote reveals that Fischer suffered paranoid delusions for a lot of his life.

In Olympiad week, permit me to make a Bollywood want of my very own — a very good, stable chess film, ideally a thriller, starring Tabu and Kay Kay Menon as grandmasters who additionally occur to be former lovers. A boy can dream, can’t he?

The author and journalist is engaged on his first e-book of non-fiction.