Every tennis fan in the world remembers the day, two years ago, when Roger Federer announced his forthcoming retirement—after two decades, 1,500 matches, and 20 Grand Slam titles—from the game he mastered. The genius of the documentary Federer: Twelve Final Days, which has its world premiere tonight at the Tribeca Film Festival, is that it almost entirely limits its focus to the period between this announcement and his final match, as part of the Laver Cup in London, less than two weeks later.
Meanwhile, the strength of the film—like so many contemporary documentaries—ultimately comes down to one word: access. Twelve Final Days began as a home-video project never intended for public viewing, and as such, the filmmakers Asif Kapadia (director of the acclaimed documentaries Amy, about Amy Winehouse, and Senna, about the late Formula 1 legend Ayrton Senna, among others) and Joe Sabia (you likely know him as the creator and voice of Vogue’s 73 Questions video series) have seemingly limitless entrée to Federer’s world. We see him in private moments of quiet (and quite emotional) reflection; we’re in his home and hotel suites with him and his wife, Mirka, their three children, and Federer’s father and mother; we’re backstage in the locker room at the O2 Arena as he thanks his friends and fellow legends; and we witness no shortage of tears.
After the briefest montage of video highlights—the sort of slow-motion meditation on form and grace that Federer’s game seems almost made for—Twelve Final Days starts with Federer trying to prepare himself to read his retirement announcement. “Hopefully I will not be using those tissues,” he says, and he mostly succeeds—though the announcement itself seems to accelerate Federer’s emotional reckoning. (Oddly, it’s the finale to this announcement—largely overlooked, for good reason, in real time, as the retirement news got all the headlines—that resonated as I watched it again with the distance of a couple of years: “Finally, to the game of tennis,” he said. “I love you and will never leave you.” For the player who, perhaps more than any other athlete in that game, defined a kind of perfection within it, it’s remarkably moving to hear Federer address tennis itself with such obvious devotion.)
The rest of the film is devoted to both the practical matters of retiring—Federer calls and texts friends with the news and fields their responses; he meets with his agent, Tony Godsick, and various friends who advise him and help him with the details of the next days—and his nearly constant reckoning with the emotions conjured up by his decision. Amidst all this, he explains the knee injuries and surgeries that led up to it and reflects on his career, his titles and records, and his rivals. We hear John McEnroe toast Federer as “a Baryshnikov of the tennis court” and—perhaps most surprisingly—we hear Federer talk about a time in his career when some people wondered, because of this oft-stated elegance on the court, “Why wouldn’t I fight more when losing?” The question dovetails with the emergence of the brash tennis warrior Novak Djokovic as a major rival of Federer’s on the sport’s biggest stages, and it clearly animates Federer, who asks, rhetorically: “Did I have to grunt more, shout, sweat? I tried, but it was all an act. That wasn’t my personality.”
What was his personality, then? It’s often lost amidst all the talk of grace and form just how lethal he was on the court, and perhaps the most revealing part of Twelve Final Days is hearing Federer discuss what we might call his philosophy of winning tennis: “I would take a lot of joy in trying to beat my opponent at his game,” he says. “If he liked to play long rallies? Okay, let’s play long rallies—I’ll beat you at that, and then you have nothing else. If he liked to come to the net? I’ll also do that, and I’ll beat you at that too.”
The arrival of Rafael Nadal 46 minutes into the film marks its movement into the final aria of Federer’s career. No other player challenged him as consistently, or for as long, as Nadal, and no other player became so close to him personally. The affection between the two is tangible throughout. (It was Nadal, alone among players, whom Federer told about his retirement 10 days before anybody else outside his family and management.) Federer calls Nadal’s ascendance in the game “a bit of a mind bender” that, at first, wasn’t entirely welcome: “I liked being at the top alone,” he adds. Nadal, in turn, simply says that “the most important player in my career…is leaving,” and it’s clear on his face and in his eyes that the notion of Federer’s absence has forced a kind of reckoning of his own.
There are some lovely, lighthearted moments among Federer, Nadal, Djokovic, and Andy Murray as they gather in London to prepare for the Laver Cup matches: at dinners (with legends like Björn Borg weighing in on everything), on boat rides, playing ping-pong in tuxedos (as one does), and generally hanging out with the kind of casual ease—tempered by respect for the occasion—that only legendary athletes seem capable of. (“I’ve had all day to think about my first return being a shank,” Federer jokes in the locker room, trying to shake off some understandable butterflies before his final match.)
Again, the tennis obsessives among us will never forget the images we saw from the Laver Cup at the O2—of Federer and Nadal struggling to contain their emotions, sitting next to one another on a bench at the side of the court, holding hands, lips quivering, tears streaming down their faces—and their emotional on-court farewell is the beating heart at the center of this film. But we also see what nobody outside of their circle has ever seen before: Federer walking back into the locker room after their final doubles match to find Nadal still sobbing, a towel hiding his face. The two share another embrace before Nadal wills himself into an emotional gearchange, shouting, “Okay, done!”
“At the end,” Federer reflects, “it was just, Okay, this is it—you know, what happens next?” And while the film doesn’t allow itself to speculate about the legend’s next move, outside of spending more time with his family, it’s stronger for it. We’re left with Federer’s final words, looking back at the entirety of his unforgettable career: “It’s been a perfect journey,” he says. “I’d do it all over again.”
Federer: Twelve Final Days streams on Prime Video from June 20.
