By Garry Maddox
UNBREAKABLE: THE JELENA DOKIC STORY
★★★★
Rated M, 104 minutes
In cinemas November 7
The thumbnail of Jelena Dokic’s tennis career is well-known: a brilliant player who reached No.4 in the world, represented Australia after arriving from Serbia as a refugee, father was a ratbag.
What even people inside tennis did not know until her 2017 book, Unbreakable, written with Jessica Halloran, was how much that ratbag father, Damir Dokic, was controlling and abusing his daughter.
Jelena Dokic at the US Open in 2000.Credit: Getty Images
It revealed a horror show of physical and emotional abuse. Jelena was only six when, after a practice session that he thought she took too lightly, Damir made her run laps of a park then, back home, screamed at her and slapped her.
The abuse became more violent as she emerged as a junior champion then worsened further when he started drinking.
Based on the book, this documentary, directed by Halloran and Ivan O’Mahoney, starts with 16-year-old Jelena, a qualifier ranked 129, thrashing world No.1 Martina Hingis in the first round at Wimbledon in 1999 and realising her father was not even applauding.
The match announced her as a potential world No.1 and future grand slam winner but that was not enough for what newspapers were soon calling “the mad dad of tennis”. He seemed coldly unmoved.
“Every day, I woke up thinking how do I make sure he doesn’t hurt me today,” Jelena says.
Damir, a truck driver, saw her tennis as a way out of poverty.
Of the many harrowing stories in the documentary, the worst is when he beats Jelena in a locked bathroom, slamming her head against the wall many times, kicking and punching her, after a loss.
What the documentary does that the book could not is show Jelena’s talent on court, her often haunted look amid controversy caused by her father, and her staunch defence of him at media conferences. Very few realised at the time that she feared being beaten or even killed if she said anything critical of him.
Some fellow players, including Rennae Stubbs and Lindsay Davenport, tried to support Jelena but Tennis Australia, the Women’s Tennis Association and even journalists covering the tour — for whom the abuse was apparently an open secret — went missing.
Jelena Dokic interviews Novak Djokovic at the Australian Open last year.Credit: Nine News
Jelena admits that by 21, she was struggling with depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and an eating disorder.
Stylistically, there are too many talking heads saying similar things - knowing Jelena’s troubles but not the extent of them - in the documentary. Despite many attempts, her father was not interviewed.
But Unbreakable is still a powerful portrait of a woman who was driven by abuse to the point of contemplating suicide but has emerged strong enough to become a respected tennis commentator, a spokesperson on family violence and mental health, and, with Halloran, author of two best-selling books.
It’s also a cautionary tale for tennis authorities about the pressures on young stars, particularly girls, when their parents see them as a meal ticket.
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