Personal Best

source: Personal Best

Trailer—Personal Best

Personal Best

Personal Best is a wonderful story of love, growing up and competition. Chris must grow up and find her own way in an intense arena. She competes with her lover Tori for prizes and the coach's attention. The movie deftly explores the issue of how to compete with and love someone at the same time. The movie is tasteful and handles the issues without a hint of the frat boy sniggering that could so easily have been the theme of the movie. One of my all-time favorite movies.

After more than 30 years of only reading about this movie, I finally checked this out of my local library. Being writer Robert Towne's directorial debut, he does a fine job here in exploring the world of women runners during the Olympic Trials especially that between a young, inexperienced one who's insecure (Mariel Hemmingway) and that of an older, much confident one (Patrice Donnelly). They develop a sexual relationship as well and the nudity here is not exploitive but natural so I don't think many men's members would be protruding during those scenes or those taking place in a sauna. All I'll now say is this was quite a compellingly good drama so on that note, I highly recommend Personal Best. P.S. I also liked the commentary of Towne and a couple of his players in this film, Scott Glenn and Kenny Moore.

In the 1976 US Olympic trials, Chris Cahill (Mariel Hemingway) chokes under her father's coaching. Tory Skinner (Patrice Donnelly) comes in second coached by Terry Tingloff (Scott Glenn). Chris has a breakdown that night and Tory comforts her. That night, they have a lesbian relationship. Tory convinces Terry to take on Chris. It's a sensitive portrayal of a lesbian relationship. The massive amount of nudity does raise the question of how exploitive this movie is. Although the camera does leer at the young women, the romance is not some pulp fiction concoction. It's sweet. It's complicated. It feels real. It's also a striped down behind-the-scene look at Olympic athletes. Patrice isn't a pro actor but does quite well. Mariel has the sweet innocent quality. It's a good relationship movie and a good sports movie.

This moderately entertaining film would have been so much better had it been shorter. There just wasn't enough of a story to drag this out for more than two hours. The sports scenes were rather well done, but after a while, I began to lose interest in the various relationships that were key to the film. During the last hour, I found that I was only sporadically interested in what was going on, and I can't recommend any film that isn't able to hold my attention throughout.

Excellent, the relationship, more friendship than sex between 2 women who are friends, lovers and rivals at the same time. At the end they are just friends. Not many movies about track and of course probably this is the only one about the intimacy of the relations between the runners, the difficulties of being not only lovers, but rivals that want the same prize. I liked it very much, instead of your typical sports film of difficulties until the final triumph, here we have the everyday training of this athletes, not famous, but hard workers. The final irony is they classify for the 80 olympic games and they could´t go.

As flawed as it might seem, and as much as Mariel Hemingway's body may have been exploited in the interest of box office sales... This was a very important movie for me and many girls my age. It was the first movie we ever saw that let us know that we weren't the only girls in the world who liked other girls. And it showed us that this could be beautiful and that we weren't freaks. For that it will always hold a special place in my heart. And the same goes for many other lesbians around my age.