Personal Best

HOW DO YOU COMPETE WITH A BODY YOU'VE ALREADY SURRENDERED TO YOUR OPPONENT? "Personal Best" is about four years in the lives of two female athletes, played by Mariel Hemingway and Patrice Donnelly. They meet as strangers at the 1976 Olympics Trials. They become friends, lovers, and ultimately competitors facing each other at the Olympic Trials in 1980. In one day of the most demanding women's event-the pentathlon-they must resolve their love, their friendship and the burden that competition imposes on them. Theirs is a relationship that suggests the "war between the sexes" is not a battle over gender, but over sexuality. Male or female, how do you compete with a body you have already surrendered to your opponent? Wars and races inevitably come down to one moment, "going for it" or "laying your ass on the line", it calls for everything in you-total risk fuelled by fierce discipline and even fiercer desire. It's the surest way to win the race, and the surest way to lose a lover. © Warner Bros, Inc.