Now on TV: Olympic dramas, the unknown Liz Taylor, and fierce Iranian women

For sports fans, the Summer Olympics in Paris is providing some escapism – and if you’d like to see some movies fully or partly set at the Olympics, there are a few choices.

If you’re into gymnastics and you need something to watch after the Simone Biles miniseries on Netflix, you can see Nadia, a TV movie about Nadia Comenici, the first gymnast to score a perfect 10 in Olympic history – but only outside of Israel, where it is available on Amazon Prime Video (and if you can’t get it, it’s almost as good to watch the many clips of Comenici available on YouTube). 

It’s a typical 80s-style TV movie but entertaining nonetheless and includes the story of how she tried to commit suicide a couple of years after her triumph, which reinforces much of what Biles says in her series about coping with intense pressure.

Sometimes athletes seem to have been coached into saying that they are just competing to have fun, but I would guess going on a picnic with friends or heading to the beach might be more far more enjoyable than spending four years training for an event that is over in a few minutes – or seconds – in a situation where one mistake can ruin the outcome. The Olympics are about achievement, not fun, and the struggle of athletes to achieve is what makes the games so dramatic.

Cool Runnings

That doesn’t mean that no one ever had fun at the Olympics, though. One of the best Olympic movies is Cool Runnings, which is based on the unlikely story of the Jamaican Olympic bobsled team in 1988 and features John Candy as their coach, which is available on Disney+ and Apple TV+.

Another underdog-at-the-1988 Winter Olympics movie is Eddie the Eagle, which is available on Apple TV+. It’s about Michael David Edwards, a seemingly klutzy British guy who dreamed of competing in the games and eventually made it to the Olympics in ski-jumping – and won hearts around the world, if not medals. Hugh Jackman plays his coach and Taron Egerton, who played Elton John in Rocketman, is Eddie.

Netflix has a new documentary series, Sprint, that follows the careers of many of the world’s top sprinters, including Usain Bolt, Michael Johnson, Allyson Felix, and many others.

The Olympics are only a part of the plot in The Swimmers, also on Netflix, a film which tells the fact-based story of two Syrian sisters, trained by their ambitious father (Ali Suliman) as swimmers. During the Syrian Civil War, they try to compete as bombs explode outside the stadium and they realize they need to leave. Using their swimming skills, they survived and saved lives after the boat they took to Greece sank. Eventually, one of the sisters, Yusra Mardini (Nathalie Issa) competed in the 2016 Olympics in Rio and the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, swimming for the Refugee Olympic team, after getting asylum in Germany. It’s a moving, well-made film.

Coming on the heels of Nyad, the movie about long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad, is The Young Woman and the Sea on Disney+. It tells the story of Gertrude “Trudy” Ederle (Daisy Ridley), a young Jewish woman from New York who became the first woman to swim across the English Channel in 1926. Her channel swim came after she won several medals, including a relay-race gold, in the Summer Olympics in Paris a hundred years ago.

Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes

Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes is an HBO Original documentary that will be shown on Cellcom TV, Hot 8, and Yes Docu on August 4 and is based on newly recovered interview tapes that were made into a film by Nanette Burstein, the director of a documentary series about Hillary Clinton and Gringo: The Dangerous Life of John McAfee.

The larger-than-life star, one of the last of those molded by the studio system, was Jewish, something people don’t always remember about her. She converted to Judaism when she married singer Eddie Fisher in 1959. Her conversion apparently wasn’t just done to please Fisher, whom she famously divorced in order to marry her Cleopatra co-star Richard Burton in 1964, as Taylor contributed significantly to Jewish causes throughout the rest of her life.

This new documentary – an advance copy of which had not yet been released to Israeli critics at press time but it has been extensively reviewed in the US – makes a case for the fact that her third husband, producer Mike Todd, who was born Avrom Hirsch Goldbogen, was truly the love of her life. He was the only husband she never divorced, dying in a plane crash less than two years after they were married. 

According to People Magazine, Taylor says on tape in the new documentary, “I never loved Eddie, I liked him. I felt sorry for him. And I liked talking [to him]. But he was not Mike.” This documentary also reveals that she tried to commit suicide by taking sleeping pills during her marriage to Fisher. “I was fed up with living,” she says. 

Her marriage to Fisher provided years of tabloid fodder because he was still married to Debbie Reynolds, seen as America’s sweetheart, when the affair began, and later the couple the press dubbed Liz and Dick made headlines on an almost daily basis for over a decade. It boggles the mind to think about how Taylor’s life and seven husbands would have created clickbait in today’s digital universe.

If you feel like watching some of her movies, the one place with a wide selection is Apple TV+. Although she was known for drama, she was quite good – maybe at her best – in the few comedies she made, especially as the daughter in Father of the Bride (1950), directed by Vincente Minnelli (the father of Liza Minnelli) with Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett as her parents. The story of how a carefully planned wedding brings chaos to a family – and how the father has a hard time walking his daughter down the aisle – is universal and has been remade several times, but this version is the best.

The Persian Version 

Seeing the movie Tatami, about the struggle of a female judoka against the regime, which just opened here, I was curious to see The Persian Version on Netflix, because it’s a comedy-drama that tells the story of an Iranian woman growing up in Brooklyn who feels torn between her Iranian and American identities.

The movie, written and directed by Maryam Keshavarz, is a mixture of a snarky story of Leila (Layla Mohammadi), a bisexual writer and filmmaker who was raised by traditional Iranian parents in Brooklyn, and a more heartfelt tale of her mother’s life. The creative artist who doesn’t feel she fits in and who struggles against parents who don’t get it is a story we’ve seen quite a few times before.

But the movie is much more interesting when it focuses on her mother, Shireen, played as a young wife by Kamand Shafieisabet and as the mother of nine by Niousha Noor, both of whom are wonderful. Shireen, who was married off at 13 to a 22-year-old doctor and quickly became pregnant, had to face isolation when she and her husband were transferred to a remote village, where he ran a clinic and she raised their son. Facing marital difficulties, she tried to strike out on her own but had to return to her husband, and kept the details of the crisis that inspired her to walk out secret. 

After raising eight boys and Leila, Shireen managed to become a successful real-estate broker despite not having a high-school diploma, and she cultivated an immigrant clientele other realtors disdained. While it might not be easy to have such a formidable mother, Shireen is a lot of fun to watch. At one point, Leila muses, “It’s so much easier to blame our mothers, isn’t it?… She was a character I couldn’t pin down, who kept reinventing herself.”

Highlights of the movie include dance sequences by her extended family in Iran, whom she visits with her mother, set to different versions of Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” The lyrics of the song, “Some boys take a beautiful girl/ and hide her away from the rest of the world/ I want to be the one to walk in the sun,” are so poignant in light of the bravery of the women protesting hijab laws today in Iran. A title at the end says The Persian Version is dedicated to her mother, grandmother, daughter and, “To all the fierce Iranian women.”