Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine Director: Vikram Jayanti Country: Canada Year: 2003

Mercifully for those of us who aren't steeped in knowledge of the game, Vikram Jayanti's documentary Game Over isn't a film about the arcane intricacies of chess. Rather, it turns out to be a deep and disturbing work that hints at something much more overreaching: a Game that extends much further than the four corners of the chessboard, which threatens every moment to make us pieces in its set. Game Over follows the story of chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov and his defeat at the hands of a computer: IBM's Deep Blue, in a series of interviews with the Deep Blue team, Kasparov's handlers, and most importantly, Kasparov himself.

Jayanti's subject matter is certainly not specifically South Asian or Indian, nor is there any reason why it should be so. And yet, one of the most striking elements of the film is distinctly Eastern. The film cuts from its own documentary material to short episodes from an old black and white film about one of Deep Blue's conceptual ancestors: an eighteenth-century automaton nicknamed the Turk, which played chess, and beat many of its opponents. Edgar Allan Poe famously exposed it as a hoax, a cabinet with a human chess expert (a hunchback) hiding inside. The Turk, as its name indicates, was dressed up in fancy Oriental garb, with flowing moustachios and a gargantuan turban. Full-colour shots of a reconstructed Turk accent the film, a mohagany machine with human features, a neat puggree, bristly mustache, a hooked nose and a stern aspect. With its long fingers of dark timber, the automaton makes its moves as the story of Kasparov vs. Deep Blue unfolds, the computer's final victory represented by the Turk coldly sweeping the pieces off the board, all the while maintaining its unfeeling stare.

One of the frustrating things about the match for Kasparov was that IBM was fiercely protective of Deep Blue and its secrets, so that Kasparov could know nothing about the machine. In the case of a human opponent, it's possible to dig up a history, to see the face and read the body language, to have some practise matches and then go out for a friendly dinner. Deep Blue was a complete mystery; even when Kasparov asked for logs, the IBM team refused -- or, worse, waffled, leaving the grandmaster psyched out and frustrated at the seeming unknowability, the absolute "otherness" of his opponent. The conflation of the mysterious computer and the mysterious Easterner is one of the film's masterstrokes.

After a very easy first match, Kasparov was blown off the board by Deep Blue, which made such human moves that Kasparov began to suspect foulplay, a man hidden in the cabinet. One of the interviewees reminds us that the human being is an animal, and a relatively weak one, without sharpness of tooth or nail, without speed or agility. The thing setting us apart is encased in the cranium, and once some other entity such as the computer comes along and seems to outdo us even in the functions of our brains, this is a big problem. Deep Blue's strange and momentous trangression of the boundary between human and machine in Game Two almost inevitably attracts suspicion, because it is simply beyond belief that this computer that is so different, so other to the human being, could possibly make such a human move. Rightly or wrongly, we regard it as medieval Christians regarded the Turks, Muslims, Jews, and others (and vice versa): as something completely different and yet dangerously, deceptively similar: the threateningly proximate Other.

The documentary casts only a light veil on what seems to be its central point. Kasparov's original victory over grandmaster Anatoly Karpov in Gorbachev's Soviet Union came to symbolize the coming changes that were to finish off the old Soviet system. Kasparov conveniently describes himself as a chessplayer who feels constricted by iron rules. He's set up, essentially, as the upstart plays with the kind of freedom that Soviet Russia yearned for in its politics. With descriptions of the match setup, and the way in which IBM controlled the rules, the PR, the playing conditions, Deep Blue's handlers, and even Kasparov's living accomodations with an iron fist, the film sets up a parallel between the Communist machine, the increasingly complex and yet ever-limited computer, and the new machine of the corporate world, which creates the illusion of freedom and bounty, masking its finite and self-interested circuitry.

Aside from being wonderfully disturbing food for thought, the documentary has its cinematographical moments as well. Interviews with Kasparov and others, which take place in orderly offices and luxurious hotels, are contradicted by the sudden materializations of labyrinthine rooms, the bland white colour of computer casing, and long shots following extensive wires to their clandestine sources. There is a striking interview with a journalist who managed to piss off IBM with his candid coverage of the event, and who was manhandled by corporate goons for his sins. Gaunt, with a nest of grey hair spurting from his pate, he's foregrounded by a bright overhanging lampshade in the dark room, shining directly on three rubicund apples on the table before him as he gives the interviewer the straight goods on what he thought of the whole thing.

Forget about that time you were checkmated by your six year old nephew; it pales in comparison to Kasparov's tragedy. As for Vikram Jayanti, it seems parochial to go on about how great it is that a Desi-Canadian has done such an excellent documentary -- Jayanti has shown himself to be a first-rate director, period. Yet it's tempting to say, as Amrish Puri's chess opponent says in DDLJ when Shahrukh Khan helps Amrish Puri to make the winning move: "He is not only genius, he is Indi-genius!"