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 here, and Queen of Chess throws its arms wide in an effort to capture the frequently depressing reality of Polgár’s experiences. Not quite wide enough, though. There is throughout the documentary’s 90 minutes the persistent sense that there’s more to Polgár’s story; that if only Emmy-winning director Rory Kennedy had been steadier with her magnifying glass the results might not feel so emotionally underdeveloped. Instead, we get a garish, skittish account of Polgár’s youthful ascent to chess superstardom, with grainy scenes of strategic prowess accompanied by jarring neon graphics and an aggressively irksome soundtrack by various female-fronted post-punk types.
At its heart, however, is Polgár’s rivalry with revered former world champion Garry Kasparov.
‘She delivered’ … Polgár playing against Garry Kasparov. Photograph: Javier Bustos Lozano/Courtesy of Netflix
“The way she played chess was not compatible with the best way to handle Garry Kasparov,” rumbles the Russian grandmaster, flapping a meaty paw dismissively. And yet, ultimately, it was: after 14 fraught games (the most notorious of which, in 1994, saw Kasparov violate the “touch move” rule), Polgár finally, at the age of 26, defeated her idol. At the time, the record-breaking feat was greeted by the Russian with a desultory handshake. And now? “She delivered,” he harrumphs.
“I had to prove myself 10 times more than if I’d been born as a boy,” says Polgár with the weariness of one long aware that no matter how extraordinary her achievements, they will never be enough for some.
Enter, sighing, László Polgár. “I never scolded [the girls] for not winning a game. Still, losing is a very bad thing,” tuts the combatively bearded septuagenarian, slumped in his huge chair like a deposed lion.
It is only in its dying moments that Queen of Chess touches on the complexity of Judit’s relationship with her father. “How do you feel about being the subject of that experiment?” asks Kennedy. Uncomfortable laughter, then silence. Polgár’s gaze drifts off. “Of course, in one hand it is not a nice way of being part of an experiment,” she says, moist-eyed, over a montage of bowl-cutted early victories. “But my father was the one who showed me the beauty of chess …” she continues, before wandering into a thicket of platitudes about self-improvement.
“Judit Polgár was a guinea pig,” says one contributor. “The fact that she achieved all these things that her father dreamed of and still remains a very normal and pleasant person, that’s … some sort of a miracle.”
This is not, you suspect, the half of it.