What is, after all, Nasty? A film made by three excellent professionals – the directors Cristian Pascariu, Tudor Giurgiu, Tudor D. Popescu, the first two of whom also act as screenwriters, and the third also signs the editing – who were accompanied by a team on measure (Alex Brendea, director of photography, Marius Leftărache, the signatory of the soundtrack), made up a downright unbeatable cast (Jimmy Connors, Bjön Borg, John McEnroe, Billie Jean King, Boris Becker, Nadia Comăneci, Gheorghe Hagi, Ion Țiriac, Stan Smith, Yannick Noah, Marc Jenner, James Longshore) and rewrote on film the most significant part of the life of a great athlete. Ilie Năstase. They did it intelligently, apparently simply, they avoided the encomiastic and the hagiographic. And with all that, they managed to capture the magnitude, the fragility, and the ephemerality of a modern myth, because what else was Ilie Năstase not only for Romania, but for the entire history of the 70s of the last century of a sport that, until him, had something perhaps much too scruffy and excessively aristocratic?
Mircea MorariuPhoto: Personal archive
All those who appear and speak in the film, from the nice and talkative Jimmy Connors and Billie Jean King to the eternally obsessed with the morgue and money and the eternally unforgiving Ion Țiriac, admit that Năstase, with its good and bad, with the eccentricities specific to a species rebellious and with others more than likely sought after, because otherwise the athlete born in Bucharest, endowed with a guiding smile and with an undeniable playful spirit, would not have been able to keep his allure of a rock star through everything he did on the field, often also in besides him, he dynamited a row of codes to cause them to be replaced by others. Among which one of conduct.
Nastase, i.e. Nasty, replaced the mandatory white in the equipment with a series of colors that were not allowed until then, got into arguments with referees, argued and reconciled with countless colleagues and above all imposed a change in the relationship between white sports and the public . By the fact that he was not the man of unanimity, that he aroused passions as well as energetic disapproval, that he caused a lot of controversy, that 50% of the spectators adored him while another 50% detested him, booed him and wanted him punished as drastically as possible originalities that very often defied all the forgiven edges, Nasty metamorphosed the sport of an elite into a popular one.
Those who lived in Romania in the 70s cannot help but remember that Năstase and Țiriac, their phenomenal victories, caused a real social phenomenon here. The children who, until then, played thieves and thieves, suddenly started playing Nastase and Țiriac. They improvised rockets out of nothing, they bought from socialist trade cheap and bad imitations and recreated in the schoolyards or in front of the blocks what happened at Wimbledon, at Roland Garros, at Forest Hills, or in Bucharest, in 1972, when the Davis Cup final was played in the capital of Romania. I think that the extent of this phenomenon speaks effectively of the detail that, at one point, Romanian Television produced a mini-series dedicated to white sports, presented by Ion Țiriac. Series of which he was obviously the model How to understand music by Leonard Bernstein. From that mini-series I think a sequence inserted towards the end of the film is cut. The one in which Țiriac addresses future generations.
The directors – Tudor Giurgiu, Cristian Pascariu and Tudor D. Popescu – had the salutary idea of not resorting to a narrator with a patriotic-trembling voice. Nasty collates archival images and testimonies from the present day. Which the age of the witnesses and the passage of time have made them more lenient and, implicitly, more tender. Most of the archive sequences, interviews with Năstase are from foreign televisions. In one such interview, the protagonist confesses that, in his head, he could not behave differently, that he has rebellious streaks, in another that he felt pressure every time he played in Bucharest.
That pressure is also easily noticeable in the interviews given to Romanian Television. Even though its reporters – I identified Carmen Dumitrescu and Alexandru Stark, I think also the forgotten Anton Groman, I think that at some point Tudor Vornicu’s voice is also heard, I hardly restrained my revulsion in front of the displaced familiarities of the Security man Emanuel Valeriu -, in one sequence the great Cristian Topescu also appears – they tried to be casual, to joke, in Nasty’s voice and way of speaking certain restraints were noticeable. Not hard to explain at all. Because, according to Ionescu, everything was political. Politics being also the holding of the final in Bucharest Davis Cup whose skepticism is explained in the film by Cristian Tudor Popescu.
Nasty it is, I repeat, a film devoted eminently to the sports career of the protagonist. He is not at all interested and does well with all the larger or smaller behavioral aberrations that did a lot of harm to the former athlete after 1989. –
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