Ping Pong: The Triumph
中国乒乓之绝地反击
China, 2023, colour, 2.35:1, 137 mins.
Directors: Deng Chao 邓超, Yu Baimei 俞白眉.
Rating: 6/10.
A decent but over-long light drama centred on the revival of China’s table-tennis standing in the early 1990s.
STORY
Beijing, 1991. In the late 1980s China’s supremacy in men’s table tennis had rapidly declined, and the international sports media had declared that the era of the Chinese was over. After an argument with the association, head trainer Li (Wu Jing) resigns and auditions are held for a replacement. Former player Dai Minjia (Deng Chao), who had lived in Rome as a coach to the Italian team for three years but had recently returned home as an assistant to Li, promises his wife – former Shaoxing opera performer Wang Ying (Sun Li) – that he’ll return to Rome, where the Italians are desperate to get him back, if he is not offered Li’s job this time. Despite the brevity of his presentation, in which he simply promises he’ll win back the Swaythling Cup in two years’ time, he is offered the job, with the association gambling his unorthodox style can revive the sport in China. He puts together an offbeat team, including two ambitious teenagers from the national youth team, Dong Shuai (Sun Xilun) and Hou Zhuoxiang (Ding Yuansen); a retired Shanghai player, Gong Feng (Cai Yida), recommended by Du Yuancheng (Li Xiaoqiang), one of his team of four trainers; and a player he’d trained previously, Bai Minhe (Xu Weizhou). After promising his “band of misfits” success if they work hard, Dai Minjia then passes them over to one of his trainers, Ni Xiaodong (Liang Chao), who’d earlier threatened to resign when he wasn’t made head trainer. After several requests of this and that from association director Mi (Tan Xihe), Dai Minjia then asks him for a video-analysis system costing US$20,000. Meanwhile, he cracks down on discipline among the players but in the process loses Bai Minhe, who resigns in protest at his treatment. Dai Minjia finally gets a video-analysis system and is able to use modern methods in training. As the team sets off to take part in an invitational in Busan, South Korea, Bai Minhe repents and come back. To the surprise of other teams, especially South Korea and current Swaythling Cup holders Sweden, China is victorious in the competition. But the team, and Dai Minjia himself, still have many ups and down ahead before they get a chance, at the 1995 world championships in Tianjin, China, to end the country’s eight-year struggle to get back to the top.
REVIEW
Part patriotic sports movie about China’s eight-year struggle during the early 1990s to get back to the top of international table tennis, part light drama centred on one man’s quirky approach to leadership, Ping Pong: The Triumph 中国乒乓之绝地反击 is in a similar aspirational vein as Looking Up 银河补习班 (2019), the last feature collaboration of actor Deng Chao 邓超 and theatre/TV writer-director Yu Baimei 俞白眉, but with a stronger overall structure. However, the film has several of the same faults, including a strong first half followed by a weaker second one, and an unnecessarily long running time. Also, try as the film-makers do to make the sport visually gripping, table tennis just isn’t in the same league dramatically as, say, rally driving (Pegasus 飞驰人生, 2019), women’s volleyball (Leap 夺冠, 2020), sprinting (Never Stop 超越, 2021) or even marathon running (On Your Mark 了不起的老爸, 2021). But it’s still a decent film overall, and it’s hard to explain its box-office failure, despite good word-of-mouth, over Chinese New Year, where it came in last of the five main contenders with a mere RMB101 million, a fraction of the RMB4 billion-plus earned by both Full River Red 满江红 and The Wandering Earth II 流浪地球2.
Deng, a popular comedian whose roots actually lie in theatre rather than film, has previously co-directed three features with Yu (knockabout farce The Breakup Guru 分手大师, 2014; cartoony rom-com Devil and Angel 恶棍天使, 2015; Looking Up), as well as one of the strongest episodes in the portmanteau film My People My Homeland 我和我的家乡 (2020). Of the features, in all of which he also starred, the best – thanks to precision film-making and great lead chemistry – is the little-known comedy Devil and Angel, an odd-couple two-hander in which he and actress-wife Sun Li 孙俪 play a hooligan debt collector and a by-the-rules accountant. They team up again in Ping Pong, though unfortunately Sun’s role, as the team trainer’s wife, is thinly developed, largely popping up now and then to complain about how little she and their child see him.
Deng plays Dai Minjia – modelled on real-life trainer Cai Zhenhua 蔡振华 – a former player who’s recruited in 1991 to revive China’s international standing in men’s table tennis, which has plummeted since the late 1980s due partly to a failure to adapt to new methods. From the outset, as he’s first introduced in Rome where he’s working with the Italian team, Dai Minjia is drawn as an outsider with his own values and ideas, and his presentation to the sports board is the shortest, simply promising he’ll win back the Swaythling Cup for China in two years. The film has a lot of sly humour, with Deng very reined back as the trainer who constantly goes against the grain – handing the training over to a deputy who threatened to resign, bringing cocky teenagers into the team, inviting a weirdo from Shanghai back into the game, as well as a player he once worked with.
Dai Minjia calls his team a “band of misfits”, and in the early stages the film looks like it could just be about an oddball trainer whipping an unbalanced group into shape. However, although several of them emerge as individuals, the players are lightly characterised and little shown away from training. And Deng, now in his early 40s, plays Dai Minjia with a mixture of seriousness and light comedy, steering the film in a subtle way rather than dominating it. It’s a further move away from his extrovert playing in Guru and Devil, and more in the subtler style of Looking Up.
Instead, the film itself and the ensemble playing are the main things, with the highly mobile camera of Chinese American d.p. Wang Dayong 王大勇 [Max Wang] (Devil and Angel; Looking Up) – especially during the training sessions and actual matches – creating a whole universe of its own and aiming to make men’s table tennis as visually sexy as possible. However, despite clever use of VFX and slo-mo, realistic staging of the international matches, and silky smooth editing by India’s Ballu Salujia (Looking Up), there’s still a limit to how sexy table tennis can ever be, and during the second half the film struggles to maintain the viewer’s interest, even though the 20-minute finale is undeniably gripping despite its large dollop of patriotism. Still, overall the movie could easily lose 20-30 minutes from the almost 2½ hours running time without any loss of impact.
Performances down the line are characterful within the limits allowed by the script, and several of Deng’s pals again make cameo appearances, including actor Wu Jing 吴京 (as a veteran trainer) and actress Dai Lele 代乐乐 (as a figure-skating trainer). Playing a large role in the film’s realism is the spot-on 1990s look by veteran art director Huo Tingxiao 霍廷霄 (Hero 英雄, 2002; House of Flying Daggers 十面埋伏, 2004; Aftershock 唐山大地震, 2010; White Deer Plain 白鹿原, 2012) and stylist Yang Dan 杨丹, always in a natural way. More formulaic is the music by Andrew Kawczynski (The Eight Hundred 八佰, 2020; The Sacrifice 金刚川, 2020), which is standard struggle/heroic wallpaper.
The film’s Chinese title means “Chinese Ping Pong: The Jedi Strike Back”.
CREDITS
Presented by Xiamen Hengye Pictures (CN), iQiyi Pictures (Beijing) (CN), Tianjin Orange Image Media (CN). Produced by Xiamen Hengye Herdsman Film Culture Communication (CN), Tianjin Orange Image Media (CN), iQiyi Pictures (Beijing) (CN), Horgos Orange Image (CN).
Script: Yu Baimei, Meng Hui, Zhang Yan. Photography: Wang Dayong [Max Wang]. Editing: Ballu Saluja. Music: Andrew Kawczynski. Main theme: Lorne Balfe. Music supervision: Yu Fei. Art direction: Huo Tingxiao. Styling: Yang Dan. Sound: Feng Yanming, Lin Xuelin, Liao Jing, Zhang Wei. Action: Luo Lixian [Bruce Law]. Visual effects: Jiang Chao, Huang Canzhou. Table-tennis technical direction: Ma Wenge.
Cast: Deng Chao (Dai Minjia), Sun Li (Wang Ying), Xu Weizhou (Bai Minhe), Duan Bowen (Huang Zhao), Cai Yida (Gong Feng), Ding Guansen (Hou Zhuoxiang), Sun Xilun (Dong Shuai), Aruna (Chen Wen), Liang Chao (Ni Xiaodong, trainer), Wang Xi (Li Fan, female fan of Bai Minhe), Tan Xihe (Mi, sports association director), Shi Liang (Qi, director), Li Mao (Lv Sen), Feng Bai (Chang Biao, team manager), Li Xiaoqiang (Du Yuancheng, trainer), Zhang Yiman (Yin Chao, trainer), Li Lizi (Hu Jingting, trainer), Ma Haoze (Wang Yonggang), Zhang Dianzhe (Ling Zhigang), Ma Anze (Yang Jizu), Yu Haoming (Wang Yao), Dai Lele (Chen, figure-skating trainer), Feng Guoqiang (Feng, section chief), Wang Bowen (Gim Jae-su, South Korean player), Xianzi (female reporter at Tianjin press conference), Shen Xue, Zhao Hongbo (sports-bureau trainers), Zhang Xiaowan, Guan Yue (South Korean cheerleaders), Wu Jing (Li, former head trainer), Bai Yu (Xia Youde, sports journalist), Zhao Xue’er (Xiaoxue, young figure skater), Wu Yaheng (sports agent).
Release: China, 17 Feb 2023.