Personal Best

Personal Best is about Chris, a talented hurdler. Chris is struggling to reach her full potential as an athlete. She strikes up a friendship with another athlete, Tory. And when I say friendship, I mean that Chris and Tory sleep together within the first 20 minutes of the movie and then it’s not really mentioned again until near the end of the second act. Through Tory, Chris improves as an athlete and trains with Tory’s professional coach, Cal. Conflict arises when Cal convinces Chris to compete in the pentathlon which is Tory’s event. No longer just friends with an ambiguously sexual component, Chris and Tory are now competing against each other.

Personal Best is a movie I wouldn’t care at all about if it wasn’t for the WLW aspect. I found it slow and the dialogue to be rather dull. Its method of developing character is long, meandering scenes that will maybe end up establishing one small personality trait or piece of back story. By the end, I still didn’t have a particularly good grasp on the personalities of any of the characters beyond, “is good at track and field.” More than anything, the movie is focuses on portraying the atmosphere of what competitive track and field is like at the top level. That’s fine but just not personally interesting to me.

However, perhaps because Personal Best’s focus was on sports, its view towards sexuality is intriguingly casual. This is a film from the 1980’s with a bisexual protagonist and a lesbian secondary character and none of that really seems to be a problem in this story. During Chris and Tory’s relationship, we see them being quite affectionate with each other in public and nobody says anything. The only time the relationship is really brought up in a way that suggests it’s anything unusual is in a brief conversation between Chris and her new, male love interest. The conversation also just establishes he doesn’t care. Seeing a story from the 1980s featuring queer protagonists where no conflict stems from their queer identity is sort of neat. Personal Best was just too interested in sports that it forgot homophobia or angst about sexual identity were things that exist.

I actually like Chris and Tory’s relationship a lot. They start as friends which I always think is a great place to start. Their relationship breaks down because Chris was under the impression that they were always, “just friends” despite sleeping together, living together and being affectionate in public. That’s one hell of a communication breakdown. Chris questioning whether she can trust Tory’s help with coaching or if she’s trying to sabotage Chris was also the most interesting interpersonal dynamic the movie had. I also love that by the end of the film, they are friends again (non-sexual friends, this time) and Tory teases Chris about her new, male love interest. This was a same-sex relationship that ran its course but still left its characters in a healthy place in regards to one another. That’s really nice to see and again, particularly unexpected from a film in the 1980’s.

The two men in Chris’s life are her coach, Cal and her third act love interest, Denny. Cal is the worst. He’s verbally abusive and a bit sexist. Chris sleeps with him after a particularly sexist tirade which I hated. I think the question with his character is, is he a good enough coach to make up for how terrible of a person he is? I ended the movie with a more definitive answer than I think I was supposed to have. My answer is no, Cal is the worst. I don’t care if he is a good coach. Cal is the least enjoyable part of the movie.

Denny is the love interest Chris ends the movie with and I actually like him. For one thing, he’s played by an actor who apparently had full-frontal nudity in his contract so good for him. He’s also quite simply not the absolute worst which makes him better than Cal. Like everyone in Personal Best, he lacks a certain degree of personality beyond being good at sports but he’s nice. I can live with nice. Their relationship does lead to a very odd and overly long scene of Chris helping Denny pee though. Could have done without that.

I understand why Personal Best is a bit of a WLW classic. Not only does it featuring explicitly queer characters, it allows them to be happy and alive. From the time it was made in, Personal Best’s take on sexuality is quite refreshing. I’m glad it exists and all, but Personal Best is not a movie I would ever feel the need to watch again. It’s slow, the characters lack depth and I just really don’t care about sports. Personal Best is an interesting relic. But as someone who exists in a time in which there are 800+ WLW films, its casual attitude towards queer sexuality isn’t going to be enough for me to overlook how much of this damn movie was about sports.

Overall rating: 6.1/10

Other WLW films in similar genres