Recently premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, “Ulya” is a biopic of Latvian-born basketball phenomenon Ulyana Semjonova, who played and won many medals and championships for the Soviet Union from the late 1960s until well into the 1980s. Yet her tragedy, as director Viesturs Kairišs‘ film presents it, is her height: At about 6 feet 5 inches, she never felt comfortable in her skin. That physical attribute is the only thing about her that everyone in her life cared about, worried about or wanted to exploit.
“Ulya” concentrates on a few years in Semjonova’s life, starting in 1964, when she’s an awkward teenager whose family wonders if she will ever stop growing. Living in a small village and belonging to the ancient Christian sect Old Believers, she leads a quiet and conservative life, helping on the family farm while trying to avoid everyone’s curiosity about her size. After her sister’s fiancé sends her picture to a basketball coach in Riga, however, she must decide between an athletic career in the big city and the quiet village life she knows.
Kairišs and DP Wojciech Staron use haunting black-and-white cinematography, sometimes unfocused to signify our heroine’s feelings of confusion and alienation. On the soundtrack, mournful wailing music presents her as a tragic character. The screenplay — written by Livia Ulman, Andris Feldmanis and lead actor Arnolds Karlis Avots — portrays her as a figure of utmost innocence and naivete, with almost every scene about her height, as she’s ridiculed by people in the streets of Riga, gossiped about by her teammates and humiliated by soldiers on the border who want to check her genitals. There’s even a rather obvious scene where Semjonova connects with a giraffe caged in a zoo. Throughout it all, she appears pained but passive: Unable to make decisions about her life, she lets everyone else push her around.
