Icarus is a shocking film about an American filmmaker getting accidentally intertwined with head of the Russian anti-doping lab, Rodchenkov, during the unfolding of the Russian doping scandal. It starts out with the juxtaposition of Lance Armstrong’s testimonies before and after his conviction of guilt, and that sets the tone for the rest of the film.
After watching this film I feel extremely belittled. This story could easily have been straight out of a John le Carré novel, but it isn’t, it all happened. An entire nation, a whole country, trying to fool the rest of the world, and perhaps even succeeding.
Those of us who live in the free countries, in the States and in India, take our liberty for granted. To us 1984 is a work of fiction, too extreme and too distant to be considered for anything beyond literary pleasure. Perhaps it isn’t. Perhaps there are parts of the world, powerful parts, where doublethink is the way of thought, where slavery is freedom, where Ignorance is strength.
In the movie Rodchenkov reads exerpts from 1984 and you can feel the boundaries between Orwell’s world and our own dissolving. I think one of the questions Orwell asks in his deeply disturbing book is whether the world can be changed modulo human endeavor, and so does this movie, and it really makes you wonder about your place in the grand scheme of things and what is it that really matters for you, is it really your next tax filing?
I think this film is wrongly named. The story of Icarus has a moral, like all children’s fables it is a propaganda story. But this movie… you should see it for yourselves.