“A gorgeously shot character drama that never feels fully realized.”

Uljana Semjonova is a two-time Olympic champion in basketball, in addition to several World titles and a string of European Championships. Simply put, she is one of the greatest female basketball players of all time. She was also the neighbor of Latvian actor Kārlis Arnolds Avots, so when he professed he wanted to play the old pawnbroker woman in Crime and Punishment, his mother remarked that he would be a very tall old woman, like his neighbor. Lightning struck, and when Arnolds Avots brought the idea to director Viesturs Kairišs the crazy idea developed from a theater play into a film, which found its way to the Cannes Film Festival on the last day of the Un Certain Regard competition. A relatively straightforward biopic that follows Semjonova up to the point where she decides basketball will be her life, what is most striking about Ulya is its grainy black-and-white photography attempting to capture the inner turmoil of its lead character.

Eastern Latvia, 1964. Letgale is the only region in the country where Slavs outnumber native Latvians. A minority of them are Old Believers, followers of the rites and liturgy of the Russian Orthodox Church before its reform in the mid 17th century. Uljana Semjonova, or Ulya for short (no pun intended), comes from such a family, small-time farmers in a remote area of the country. She is exceptionally tall for a girl, or even a boy; she is already a head taller than her father. A local physician suspects it was the growth hormones in the cattle fodder that she was fed during years of famine. Whatever the reason for her unusual height, when school photos reach the desks of basketball coaches in Riga, they soon come flocking to the small farm. Reluctantly, Ulya agrees to join Riga’s elite women’s team, hoping that in the big city she will not be judged, often negatively, on her height all the time like she is in the countryside. False hope, because her height is the only reason she was selected in the first place; she has to be taught the basics of basketball when she arrives, having never held a ball in her life. She is also shunned and bullied by the other girls, although she gradually gains respect parallel to her qualities as a player improving. Despite that, she still feels out of place, and only valued for her physical attributes. She flees back home, but soon realizes it isn’t any different there, and thus she comes to the realization that she should use her strengths and shape her own life.

A film about being an outsider and finding your identity as such, the most notable aspects of Ulya are not its story, but the cinematography and the fact that the lead female character is played by a male actor. Initially coming off as stunt casting, learning that it was Arnolds Avots who brought the idea to the director puts a different perspective on the performance. Arnolds Avots plays Ulya’s insecurity and paradoxical fragility beautifully, although the character crawling into her shell and not being very communicative at times makes her seem almost of low intelligence. Kairišs tries to overcome this using Wojciech Staroń’s evocative cinematography, which attempts to capture Ulya’s inner world through poetic, impressionistic shots of Letgale’s landscape or blurred, fractured imagery during Ulya’s stints in Riga. The result is striking, but never fully gels with Arnolds Avots’ performance, because it is hard to unsee the fact that it’s a male actor playing a female role, no matter how tender Arnolds Avots’ approach. At one point, during a routine security check while the team is on the road, a police officer sticks his hand in Ulya’s crotch to check if her biological gender matches the one on her ID (this is also the moment her teammates become more sympathetic to Ulya, in a wave of female solidarity). It is meant as an indictment of his treatment, but while his methods are questionable (to say the least), his doubts are understandable.

While the performance and the tech work behind the camera are a net positive for the film, even if they are not always congruent, they can’t hide the fact that a lot of the narrative is simple biopic material. Semjonova’s psychological and emotional journey is one of the outsider finding their footing and their place in the world, but since it leads to triumph after initial faltering, Ulya in that regard doesn’t differ very much from your average sports biopic. It doesn’t help that the many basketball segments lack any sort of dynamism, and also make Ulya look like the worst player ever. This is supposed to be an elite basketball team, but the level of skill would be below par for a high school team, at least in the way Kairišs shoots these scenes. In a film in which basketball plays a large part in the development of identity for the protagonist, who is simply a head taller, if not more, than her opponents and thus hard to defend, the weakness of these scenes deals a big blow to the film. What we are left with in Ulya is a gorgeously shot character drama that never feels fully realized.