Queen of Chess review – how the greatest female player of all time checkmated the sexist establishment
She was raised as part of a prodigy-breeding psychological experiment, took on the chess patriarchy and beat her idol Garry Kasparov. So why isn’t there more depth to this documentary?Judit...
By Sarah Dempster · The Guardian Culture
She was raised as part of a prodigy-breeding psychological experiment, took on the chess patriarchy and beat her idol Garry Kasparov. So why isn’t there more depth to this documentary? Judit Polgár won her first chess tournament in 1981 when, at the age of six, she marmalised a string of middle-aged Hungarians and toddled off with a swanky Boris Diplomat Bd-1 Electronic Chess Computer. “I was a killer,” says the amiable 49-year-old in Netflix documentary Queen of Chess. “I wanted to kill my opponents. I would sacrifice everything to get checkmate.” Archive footage captures the bloody aftermath of Polgár’s inaugural victory; a roomful of solemnly jumpered victims looking on, dazed and ashen-jowled, as the vanquishing Hungarian scowls at photographers from beneath a bowl cut that could confidently be described as “ferocious”. The triumph put paid (at least temporarily) to Polgár’s painful shyness, making her feel “exceptionally powerful. After this, it was so obvious for me that I’m going to be a chess player. And if you want to become the best,” she says with a wry smile, “it’s very important to have the challenges.” Ah, yes. The challenges. But with which to start? Queen of Chess – a rhapsodic account of the life of the greatest female chess player of all time – is spoiled for choice. There is the punishing chess-training regime, designed as an experiment by Polgár’s educational psychologist father László to prove “geniuses are made, not born”. (School and weekends were banned so “every day was a working day.”) There is the communist regime so threatened by the family’s ambitions to compete in the west that it confiscated their passports. There is the relentless sexism that trailed the tiny trailblazer and older chess-playing sisters Susan and Sofia, outraged at the temerity of their insistence on taking on the male-dominated sport’s grandmasters while delivering pronouncements of the “women lack the pure mental ability needed to understand chess” variety. It’s all…