The Queen's Gambit

The Queen's Gambit (2020)

Written, Directed and Co-created by: Scott Frank
Starring: Anya Taylor-Joy
Streaming on Netflix.

This is the story of the obsessed artist. How does it feel when you dedicate your entire life to one thing? Your mind is thinking about it all the time. Irrespective of what you are doing. It's likely that if you stay like that for a couple of years, you'd become good at it. But what about your life apart from that? That is the question these stories have dealt with - films like Whiplash, Black Swan, Shankarabharanam, The Disciple, and Queen's Gambit too falls in the same umbrella. All these stories have told that it's quite tough and lonely. Because people think you are mad, and would go nowhere, until you are successful. Queen's Gambit is at least not as heartbreaking as The Disciple - because she is good at it and gets a lot of acclaim for her game. The Disciple is the story of a guy who no matter how hard he tries, and how much of his life he dedicates, he just can't achieve excellence. He never sees the moment of excellence that the artists achieve in the endings of Whiplash, Black Swan and Queen's Gambit. This moment is what these artists have been longing for all their lives. And when it comes, it is gratifying. 

Chess is not a very visual game, for it being a cinematic tool. But they do her taking the tranquilizers and imagining a game on the roof, which they even use in the ending - which is a good pay off. Queen's Gambit is also about dealing with success and money at a young age - they ask a beautiful existential question - if you become the world's best chess player at 21, what will you do the rest of your life? This question makes total sense, because the pursuit of being in something is what keeps us look forward to something in life, which is also why perhaps people who have everything in life are not necessarily happy. You need to have problems in life, which you have to keep solving for life to keep going.