Federer: Twelve Final Days (2024) Documentary Review

For me, even before I knew the intricacies of any sport or expressed any fandom regarding following any sport, their existence would be conveyed via the names of legends—athletes whose excellence transcended the sporting bubble they operated in and reached the collective consciousness. Thus, while cricket had many examples, considering the country I belong to and the sport my father and I would watch the most, other sports had specific names that pierced through the fog of my childhood brain.

Formula 1: Michael Schumacher; football: David Beckham or Diego Maradona; basketball: Michael Jordan.

Tennis: Roger Federer.

The first time I finally had the chance to see Roger Federer on television was in a Rolex advertisement. Still, I managed to catch the “Wimbledon Trilogy” between Federer and Nadal in spurts between 2007 and 2008, even though I did not know about it and thus had no interest in the game. But as the interest grew and it became a bonding exercise between me and my late father to learn about the rules of the games and follow along, it became crystal clear how a player at his absolute peak looked, moved, and executed.

This documentary should be tackled and reviewed in two aspects. Firstly, as a retrospective of Federer and his legacy as a player, how the unprecedented access behind the scenes contributed to the girth and legitimacy of the documentary. Secondly, how Asif Kapadia’s fourth documentary on real-life genius figures and his third following a sporting legend fares through.

Federer: Twelve Final Days (2024) Documentary Review — A still from “Federer: Twelve Final Days” (2024)

It would be preferable to understand the intent of this documentary. The crew follows along with Federer and his team as he prepares for his final match. It begins with Federer preparing his farewell speech, and the unobtrusive camera allows us to see his mask fall for just a second (perhaps a fluttering of fear) before he becomes his genial self and finishes the speech. He would play his final match at the Laver Cup, a three-day hard-court international men’s tennis tournament between Team Europe and Team World (comprised of players from all other continents except Europe). It is perhaps not coincidental that the final match he would play in is in the Laver Cup, a tournament founded by Federer’s own management team (TEAM8), and it would be a doubles match where he would be partnered with his famous on-court rival and off-court close friend Rafael Nadal.

But if that above statement reeks of cynicism from my end, that cynicism does seem misplaced considering Federer’s own choice to retire after having had surgery on his knees and realizing that it is better to bow out. But what Kapadia and co-director Joe Sabia manage to highlight is Federer’s single-minded love for the game. Thus, the sadness the man experiences immediately after and throughout this documentary feels palpable. He has acknowledged his physical limitations, but to console his heart as he prepares himself to walk away from the court is a different form of pain.

Thus, when Nadal and Federer finally lose, and as news channels would cover, the final score never matters as the intent had been the farewell; the loss also proves the game is bigger than the player. As Federer espouses himself in the documentary “Nothing about tennis is scripted,” which works very well as a companion to one such moment while interviewed after winning, “Tennis is a crazy game.” This love almost erupts into sadness when, immediately after announcing that he would do this all over again, he breaks down.

Through those shakes, the handheld camera manages to capture the intimacy of that moment as the farewell hits hard, not just for Federer but also for his fans and his most famous rivals. One of the positives of this documentary is the voiceover of Federer recounting his thoughts and opinions about each of his rivals, be it Djokovic, Murray, or Nadal. Federer also devotes a significant amount of time to describing the enormity of Bjorn Borg’s career, both on and off-field.

But it is these voiceovers and the follow-along nature of the documentary that not only make this a slightly conventional retrospection piece but also a far cry from Kapadia’s usual oeuvre. As a documentary director, Kapadia is known for almost changing the verve of the genre by not utilizing any form of talking-heads structure in “Senna,” “Amy,” or “Diego Maradona,” but rather using archival footage to construct a narrative, through which Kapadia would try to explore the irascible geniuses and decode what made them fall from grace.

Federer stands out even more because this is an Icarus who flew close to the sun but never burned, comfortably rotating around its orbit and then returning to the ground, cuts and bruises along his flight notwithstanding. That automatically perhaps robs one of the dramas one would expect from Kapadia’s other documentaries or even a form of filmmaking style. Considering the structural framework of the documentary and the subject it is covering, perhaps a blase approach to filmmaking style wouldn’t get in the way, as long as the emotional evocations shine through.

There are moments, though, where the camera captures the players talking, bantering about tuxedo shirts, or Djokovic contemplating the hard ground, which teases a different form of follow-through with no voiceover. Moments of the match cut with the present-day Federer wearing his headband and cut back to footage of 20-year-old Federer applying the same preparatory ritual. It perhaps teased a far different documentary, but for Kapadia, conventionality seems unconventional.

But for fans of Federer and the game in general, hoping to see a last glimpse of the man in his glory and humility and yet with the same determination and ferocity in court, “Federer: Twelve Final Days” hits the requisite beats.