Maria Sharapova announced her retirement from professional tennis on Thursday. The five-time Grand Slam champion has struggled for form and fitness since returning to the sport in April 2017 following a fifteen-month doping suspension, and the recurring shoulder issues which marked her playing career have prompted her decision to wave goodbye at thirty-two years old. Sharapova was just seventeen when she stunned Serena Williams on the grass of Wimbledon, claiming her first Grand Slam title in the summer of 2004. The following year she attained the world number one ranking, and in 2006 she beat Justin Henin in the final of the US Open to hoist her second Grand Slam. Shoulder injuries hampered subsequent seasons, but amid surgeries and spells of rehabilitation, in 2008 Sharapova claimed the Australian Open with a victory over Ana Ivanovic. In 2012 she completed her comeback with success on the clay of Roland Garros, previously her least favourite surface, as she added the French Open in a year that also brought a return to world number one and a silver medal at the London Olympics.
In the process Sharapova became one of only ten women to hold a career Grand Slam, meaning success in each of the sport’s four major tournaments. By 2014, on the slippery red clay she looked not only natural but dominant, as in her third final in three years she beat Simona Halep, to once again hold aloft the Coupe Suzanne Lenglen. Following an injury-plagued 2015, in March 2016 Sharapova revealed that she had failed a drugs test at the Australian Open, testing positive for meldonium which had been added to the World Anti-Doping Agency’s list of banned substances at the start of the year. Citing her historic use of the drug on the basis of a doctor’s prescription, and her limited fault in failing to navigate the new regulations, the Court of Arbitration for Sport reduced her initial two-year suspension to fifteen months. Upon her return Sharapova won the Tianjin Open for her thirty-sixth career title, and in 2018 she reached the quarter-finals at the French and climbed inside the top twenty-five in the world. However her shoulder issues proved impossible to shake, and after playing havoc with her 2019 season, when she lost to Donna Vekić in the first round of the Australian Open at the start of 2020, she plummeted to a low of 369 in the world.
Sharapova’s renowned tenacity held firm through injuries and Grand Slam finals, even if it was sometimes belied by her lopsided record against Serena Williams, one of the sport’s biggest rivalries which nevertheless provided Serena with twenty victories at the expense of Sharapova’s meagre two. Beyond the Williams sisters, at the time of Sharapova’s retirement there was no more successful player on the women’s tour. Typically skirting the borders of tennis, Sharapova announced her retirement with an essay which featured in both Vanity Fair and Vogue. She wrote:
‘In giving my life to tennis, tennis gave me a life. I’ll miss it everyday. I’ll miss the training and my daily routine: Waking up at dawn, lacing my left shoe before my right, and closing the court’s gate before I hit my first ball of the day. I’ll miss my team, my coaches. I’ll miss the moments sitting with my father on the practice court bench. The handshakes – win or lose – and the athletes, whether they knew it or not, who pushed me to be my best.
Looking back now, I realize that tennis has been my mountain. My path has been filled with valleys and detours, but the views from its peak were incredible. After 28 years and five Grand Slam titles, though, I’m ready to scale another mountain – to compete on a different type of terrain.’
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The French film industry went off script this week, as reports indicated that the entire staff of Cahiers du Cinéma had resigned owing to concerns over the magazine’s ownership. Subsequent reports suggested that at least two members of the fifteen-strong editorial board were considering remaining in their posts. Founded in 1951 by the film theorist André Bazin, Cahiers du Cinéma became synonymous with auteur theory and the critical reappraisal of commercial Hollywood films by directors including Alfred Hitchcock and Douglas Sirk, as the magazine moved away from its roots in French and Italian realism. In the 1950s, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and François Truffaut were among the magazine’s writers, before their fledgeling work as directors established the French New Wave. Éric Rohmer served as the editor of Cahiers du Cinéma from 1957, and Jacques Rivette succeeded him in 1963 as the magazine’s perspective became more politically left-wing.
Cahiers du Cinéma continues to be published monthly by Phaidon Press. Last month, the magazine was bought by a consortium of bankers, tech entrepreneurs, and film producers. The editor-in-chief of the magazine, Stéphane Delorme, and the deputy editor Jean-Philippe Tessé, who has worked at Cahiers du Cinéma for seventeen years, are among those who have resigned from the publication. In a collective statement, the journalists said:
‘The new shareholding structure is comprised of eight producers, which poses an immediate conflict of interest for a critical review. Whatever Cahiers published on the films of these producers would automatically be suspect. The autonomous charter presented by these new shareholders has already been contradicted by several brutal press announcements. We were told that our review should “refocus on French cinema”. The appointment of the director general of the Société des Réalisateurs de films, Julie Lethiphu, adds to fears of an influence from the French cinema community. Cahiers has always been a critical review, committed to clear positions. It would be distorting Cahiers to make it a flashy showcase or a platform for French cinema.’
Meanwhile the César Awards – a French take on the Oscars, the most prestigious award for film on offer in France – headed into its annual ceremony in its own state of turmoil. Grumblings when the César Academy blocked the attendance of feminist filmmakers Virginie Despentes and Claire Denis to a dinner party in January turned into outrage when Roman Polanski’s latest picture, An Officer and a Spy, was nominated by the Academy for twelve awards. Amid wide condemnation over the decision to continually honour Polanski, given his tumultuous history of rape and alleged sexual assault, a petition to overhaul the Césars signed by four hundred prominent figures was published in Le Monde, and the twenty-one member board of the César Academy announced that following this year’s ceremony they would resign en masse.
The 45th César Awards took place on Friday from the Salle Pleyel in Paris. Presided over by Sandrine Kiberlain, with Florence Foresti serving as host, the big winner on the night was Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables, a searing depiction of clashes in the banlieues of Paris between immigrant youngsters and the police, which won the prize for best film. Roschdy Zem for Oh Mercy! and Anaïs Demoustier for Alice and the Mayor took home the top acting awards, Claire Mathon won best cinematography for Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and the best foreign film award went to Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite. But although he had announced earlier in the week that he would not attend the ceremony, Roman Polanski still stole the show by virtue of his victory in the best director category. The result prompted the actress Adèle Haenel, who last November recounted her own experience of sexual harassment within the film industry, to lead a flurry of walkouts.
Meanwhile over in Germany, the 70th annual Berlin International Film Festival was reaching a climax. With executive and artistic directors Mariette Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian succeeding Dieter Kosslick at the helm and an emphasis on diversity, the Berlinale opened last week with a red carpet gala and My Salinger Year, a mentor-pupil narrative set in a New York City literary agency which stars Margaret Qualley and Sigourney Weaver and was met with mixed reviews. Faring little better was Andrew Levitas’ Minamata, which had its world premiere at the festival, starring an ‘unrecognisable’ Johnny Depp as the photojournalist W. Eugene Smith, who travels to Japan to document an outbreak of mercury poisoning. There were holdovers from Sundance in the form of experimental director Josephine Decker’s Shirley, featuring Elisabeth Moss and Michael Stuhlbarg as the author Shirley Jackson and her professorial husband Stanley Edgar Hyman, and Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always, a quietly unconventional abortion-led road trip. And First Cow, a pastoral by Kelly Reichardt, led slow cinema to the pinnacle as the Berlinale moved into its second week.
First Cow was competing in the main competition, alongside a bevy of diverse duos incorporating All the Dead Ones, a spectral Brazilian slavery drama by Caetano Gotardo and Marco Dutra; Bad Tales, a family tragedy by Damiano and Fabio D’Innocenzo set in the outskirts of Rome; DUA. Natasha, an immersive art project by Ilya Khrzhanovsky and Jekaterina Oertel which has been likened to Synecdoche, New York; Delete History, an absurdist tech comedy by the French filmmakers Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern; and the Swiss sibling drama My Little Sister by Stéphanie Chuat and Véronique Reymond. There were further collaborations, as Sally Potter reunited with Elle Fanning for The Roads Not Taken, which puts Javier Bardem, Salma Hayek, and Laura Linney together in an all-star cast, while in Siberia Abel Ferrera teams for the sixth time with Willem Dafoe. And documentaries came thick and fast from the collective war memory Irradiated to Gunda, an environmentalist paean to the humble pig. Eventually after more than ten days of watching and deliberating, the competition panel led by Jeremy Irons announced its winner, and the Golden Bear went to There Is No Evil, four stories about the death penalty by the Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof.
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Astronomers this week uncovered the biggest explosion ever observed in our Universe, a cosmic blast larger than any we have witnessed since the Big Bang. The eruption occurred in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster, approximately 390 million light-years from Earth. Generated by a black hole in the cluster’s central galaxy, the resulting explosion released five times more energy than the previous record holder and hundreds of thousands of times more than a typical galaxy cluster, punching an enormous cavity into the surrounding hot gas. In fact the size of the explosion initially worked against its detection: astronomers using X-ray telescopes had observed the cavity in the cluster plasma, but they dismissed the idea of an eruption because the size of the rupture and the amount of energy required seemed much too large.
Researchers only understood the true nature of their discovery when they instead looked at the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster with radio telescopes. Using telescopes from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton, the Murchison Widefield Array in Western Australia, and the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope in India, the combined data confirmed a massive blast and a resulting cavity wall. The find was published this week in The Astrophysical Journal, in a paper authored by Simona Giacintucci and Tracy Clarke of the Naval Research Laboratory, Daniel Wik and Qian Wang of the University of Utah, Maxim Markevitch from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and Melanie Johnston-Hollitt from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy in Australia. A 2016 paper by Norbert Werner first touted the explosion. Describing their results, Markevitch said ‘The radio data fit inside the X-rays like a hand in a glove. This is the clincher that tells us an eruption of unprecedented size occurred here’.
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Saturday saw the premiere of Queen Sono, the first African original series to air on Netflix. Spanning the continent both geographically and linguistically, the drama follows a clandestine South African agent who tackles criminal operations while dealing with crises in her personal life. The series stars Pearl Thusi in the title role, alongside a cast of relative newcomers, dramatic actors, comedians, and veterans including Vuyo Dabula, Kate Liquorish, Loyiso Madinga, and Abigail Kubeka. The multi-talented stand-up, actor, and director Kagiso Lediga directs, alongside the producer Tamsin Andersson, the pair having last collaborated with Thusi on the romantic drama Catching Feelings which was released in cinemas in March 2018 before being made available a couple of months later by Netflix.
Spanning thirty-seven locations from Johannesburg, Harare, and Nairobi to Zanzibar and Lagos, Queen Sono is infused with Lediga’s comic flair, a satirical edge, and high-octane action sequences redolent of spy thrillers both new and old. Queen Sono was ordered by Netflix in December 2018, as part of a push into the continent by the streaming platform’s vice president of international originals Erik Barmack. Last year, Netflix distributed two acclaimed African pictures in the form of Genevieve Nnaji’s Lionheart, Nigeria’s first ever entry for the Best International Feature Oscar before the Academy disqualified the movie for containing too much English, and Mati Diop’s Atlantics which made her the first black female director to feature in the main competition at Cannes. Earlier this week, Netflix ordered its first Nigerian original series from the director Akin Omotoso. Commenting at the time of Queen Sono‘s announcement, Pearl Thusi – an actress, model, and television host known for her roles in Quantico, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, and as the host of Lip Sync Battle Africa – wrote ‘I cannot wait for every woman on this continent, and actually on this planet, to meet Queen Sono. It’s going to change the game for every artist on this continent’.
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Amid television series splashes and cinematic bust-ups and blowouts, sporting retirements and peeks beyond the globe, the coronavirus caused a string of cultural cancellations this week, as the World Health Organization raised its risk assessment to the highest level, and stock markets suffered their worst week since the financial crisis rocked the world economy back in 2008. In Italy, where the spread of the virus centres on Lombardy, a slew of Serie A football matches were cancelled as the toll in the country jumped to 1,694 cases and 34 deaths. After discussions with workers, on Saturday the Louvre Museum closed its doors, while hot off the heels of Milan, Paris Fashion Week commenced replete with face masks. Tokyo Marathon took place on Sunday, but Ethiopia’s Birhanu Legese and Israel’s Lonah Korlima Chemtai Salpeter recorded impressive victories out on empty streets. By the end of the week, COVID-19 had spread to fifty-eight countries, with 87,137 cases confirmed worldwide, the bulk occurring in locked down China, which had recorded 79,968 cases and 2,873 deaths.
