Leap

夺冠

Hong Kong/China, 2020, colour, 2.35:1, 134 mins.

Director: Chen Kexin 陈可辛 [Peter Chan].

Rating: 8/10.

Celebration of women’s volleyball in China’s modern development is shaded by a story of friendship between two veteran trainers.

STORY

Beijing Olympics, 2008. China and the US are about to play a match in women’s volleyball. The US team’s trainer is Lang Ping (Gong Li), known as the Iron Hammer 铁榔头, who was once in the China team that won five consecutive times in the World Cup in the early 1980s before she moved to the US. The China team’s trainer is her old friend of 30 years, who once helped her train, Chen Zhonghe (Huang Bo). (In 1979, a year after China started to reform and open up, the national team had been preparing for the Third Women’s Volleyball World Cup in a gym in Zhangzhou under the relentless scrutiny of trainer Yuan Weimin [Wu Gang]. Chen Zhonghe [Peng Yuchang], a cadre from Fujian province, had been assigned to work with the team for a few weeks as a hitter. In the gym he’d met Lang Ping [Bai Lang], a tall girl from Beijing who was a team backup, and was then lifting weights to build up her leg strength. An official [Li Xian] from the general administration of sports had arrived to introduce Yuan Weimin to the new computer technology that he said the US was using to analyse players’ and trainers’ performances. Yuan Weimin had been dismissive of the whole idea. In 1980, on Chinese New Year’s Eve, the women’s team had been pitted against the Jiangsu men’s team to gain experience. Lang Ping had distinguished herself in the match; but afterwards Yuan Weimin had still kept training the team, right up to midnight. Later, 125 days before the World Cup started the team had moved to Beijing to train, and Chen Zhonghe, who was still with them, had gone too. But he hadn’t accompanied them to Japan for the actual championships. In Nov 1981, after a nail-biting match, China had beaten Japan, helped by Lang Ping’s participation at a crucial point. During 1981-86 China’s women’s vollyball team had become the first in history to win five World Cups in a row. In 1987 Lang Ping had left to study in the US, while Chen Zhonghe had stayed with the natonal team. In 2003, after a gap of 17 years, China had again won the World Cup, this time under trainer Chen Zhonghe [Huang Bo]; and at the 2004 Athens Olympics it had won gold. In 2005 Lang Ping [Gong Li] had become the first female coach of the US national volleyball team.) On the eve of the China-US match at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Lang Ping and Chen Zhonghe meet socially for old times’ sake. The next day, the US wins. Lang Ping resigns her job. For the next five years Chinese women’s volleyball is in the dumps. In 2013 Lang Ping is living in Irvine, California, with her grown daughter Lydia (Xu Wenshan) but China is on her mind. In Beijing a old teammate from the 1980s, Chen Zhaodi (Liu Mintao), is dying of cancer and begs Lang Ping to come back to China. Later, Lang Ping is announced as the new trainer of the women’s national volleyball team, and she sets about making major reforms, suitable for the new age.

REVIEW

An overtly patriotic celebration of China’s female vollyball teams during the 1980s and 2010s, but shaded by a story of longtime friendship between two veteran trainers, Leap 夺冠 was the first directorial outing to be released in six years by Hong Kong film-maker Chen Kexin 陈可辛 [Peter Chan] when it appeared in autumn 2020. Chen had previously shot another sports movie, tennis biopic Li Na 李娜, during Oct 2018 to Feb 2019, but it remained (and still remains) in limbo, reportedly due to a failure by the director and China Film Administration to agree on a release version. In the event, Chen went straight into production on Leap, which he shot from mid-April 2019 to Aug 2019 in Beijing, Tianjin and Canada. Its planned release date of 25 Jan 2020 was cancelled due to Covid restrictions, and it was eventually released on 25 Sep around the National Day holiday period. It took a very hunky, but not massive, RMB836 million, putting it in third place behind other Golden Week contenders My People My Homeland 我和我的家乡 (RMB2.8 billion) and CG fantasy Jiang Ziya 姜子牙 (RMB1.6 billion), and was the year’s fifth biggest grosser in the Mainland.

China has a long history of inspirational sports films, as far back as Queen of Sports 体育皇后 (1934, a star vehicle for actres Li Lili 黎莉莉), and in PRC times movies like Woman Basketball Player No. 5 女篮5号 (1957), Sisters on Ice 冰上姐妹 (1959), Two Generations of Swimmers 水上春秋 (1959) and Diving Girls 女跳水队员 (1964). There’s been a recent revival in sports-themed films – all made after Leap – from sprinting (Never Stop 超越, 2021) to marathon running (On Your Mark 了不起的老爸, 2021), and basketball (Lose to Win 好像也没那么热血沸腾, 2023) to table tennis (Ping Pong: The Triumph 好像也没那么热血沸腾, 2023). Emphasis differs – from out-and-out patriotism to the correct “sporting spirit” – and Leap is thoroughly in the first category, with an opening in which on-screen slogans signal the patriotic ideal (“Country first, work together, fight and never give up” 祖国至上   团结协作   顽强拼搏   永不言败) and how women’s volleyball represented the spirit of an era, the loudest voice in the rise of China. In the latter respect, the strength of women’s volleyball on the world stage during the 1980s is directly tied to the country’s own development and need for recognition at the time, as is the sport’s return to prominence during the 2010s after years in eclipse. The same theme was reprised in the more recent Ping Pong, centred on table tennis during the 1990s, though the film flopped at the box office despite the presence of popular comedian Deng Chao 邓超.

Chen is too experienced a film-maker to make just a flag-waver, though the recent experience of Li Na must have played a part in the decision not to be in any way controversial. Actress Gong Li 巩俐 was also a prime mover behind the film, and as well as taking the lead role of player-turned-trainer Lang Ping 郎平 (now retired) gets a credit as “executive line producer” 总策划 (literally, “chief planner”). It marked the return of Gong, then in her mid-50s, to the limelight after several years marking time, though she hasn’t had another film released since.

Wearing severe glasses and an emotionless gaze, Gong is a reasonable facsimile of the actual Lang Ping and manages to make the role her own despite (after a brief appearance at the start) only really coming into the film at the 55-minute mark as the middle-aged character. Ditto the popular Huang Bo 黄渤, as the young cadre who rose to become the national team’s trainer after Lang Ping left for the US in 1987. Their wary but warm friendship, with Huang underplaying like mad, underscores the film’s second half – a man who stayed and a woman who left but came back, both of them marked by the experience of their original trainer (veteran character actor Wu Gang 吴刚) and she scarred by the irony of having led the US team to victory over China at the Beijing Olympics.

Though he’s only in the film’s first half, Wu (so good as the writer in A Hustle Bustle New Year 没有过不去的年, 2021) gives the film’s standout performance as an old-school, relentlessly authoritarian trainer who bleeds the sport and expects every girl in the team to do the same. He’s also in the film’s best half – a reconstruction, framed by documentary footage, of China in the late 1970s and early 1980s that’s utterly authentic. Production design by Sun Li 孙立 and styling by Hong Kong’s Wu Lilu 吴里璐 [Dora Ng] – both old colleagues of director Chen – have a real rather than consciously “period” look, both supported by the textured visuals of d.p. Zhao Xiaoshi 赵晓时 (Forever Enthralled 梅兰芳, 2008; Wheat 麦田, 2009; A Hustle Bustle New Year).

The volleyball players look equally of that era. Lang Ping’s actual daughter, Bai Lang 白浪, plays the 1980s version of the character, while youth draw Peng Yuchang 彭昱畅 (Our Shining Days 闪光少女, 2017; Go Brother 快把我哥带走, 2018) is a believable younger version of actor Huang. So atmospheric and strongly characterised is the movie’s first half that the sudden switch back to the bright, “modern” China of 2008 is initially disconcerting, and it’s only thanks to Gong and Huang’s performances – as Lang Ping is determined to revive women’s volleyball in a China that now “doesn’t need it any longer” – that the film recovers a strong direction of travel, not a little bit helped by a section in which the team is taken back to the old gym used 30 years earlier.

Though women’s volleyball fans will get a rush from seeing lots of famous faces playing themselves in the second half – among whom, kudos to Zhu Ting 朱婷 as a gawky player, a latter-day version of Lang Ping, trying to “fit in” – it’s not absolutely necessary to be a sports fan to get involved. The four matches that anchor the film are staged in slightly different ways: the 1980 match vs a men’s team was shot in a traditional way, with separate setups; the 1981 match vs Japan was shot with multiple cameras; the 2008 Beijing Olympics match is primarily viewed through the two trainers’ eyes; and the climactic 2016 Rio Olympics match was shot with multiple cameras and with the actual players trying to recreate their moves of the time. So authentic are the three international matches that they look as if they were shot at the time.

On the debit side, Leap doesn’t need to be over two hours long as, despite the best efforts of Chen and regular writer Zhang Ji 张冀 (American Dreams in China 中国合伙人, 2013; Dearest 亲爱的, 2014; Li Na), the structure, which simplifies Lang Ping’s career, does become repetitive (inspirational speeches, life-or-death matches, emotional ups and downs). The score by Japan’s Umebayashi Shigeru 梅林茂 is easy-on-the-ear and suitably uplifting but never takes chances. And at times the slick editing by the then-rising Zhang Yibo 张一博 (Better Days 少年的你, 2019) becomes too antsy and exhausting. Only thanks to Chen’s sheer film-making technique, and his insistence on total authenticity, does Leap manage to be emotionally affecting in its final stages.

Until just before release the film’s Chinese title was the bland 中国女排 (literally, “China’s Women’s Volleyball”). The new title means “Snatching the Crown”, i.e. coming first.

CREDITS

Presented by We Pictures (HK), Beijing JQ Spring Pictures (CN), Huaxia Film Distribution (CN), Huanxi Media Group (CN), Alibaba Pictures (Beijing) (CN), Lian Ray (Shanghai) Pictures (CN), China Film (CN), Emei Film Group (CN), Zhejiang Film & TV (Group) (CN), Cultural Investment Holdings (CN), Zhejiang Culture Industry Investment Group (CN), Shanghai Such A Good Film (CN). Produced by We Pictures (HK).

Script: Zhang Ji. Photography: Zhao Xiaoshi. Editing: Zhang Yibo. Music: Umebayashi Shigeru. Additional music: Luo Jian [Lincoln Lo]. Production design: Sun Li. Art direction: Li Xiaoliang. Costumes: Wu Meng. Styling: Wu Lilu [Dora Ng]. Sound: Huang Zheng, Steve Burgess. Visual effects: Xu Li (Base FX). Volleyball technical advice: He Yunshu.

Cast: Gong Li (Lang Ping/Jenny), Huang Bo (Chen Zhonghe), Wu Gang (Yuan Weimin), Peng Yuchang (young Chen Zhonghe), Bai Lang (young Lang Ping), Liu Mintao (dying Chen Zhaodi), Li Xian (general administration of sports official), Xing Jiadong (Li Xuegang), Song Shixiong (voice of 1981 World Cup commentator), Zhang Changning, Hui Ruoqi, Ding Xia, Xu Yunli, Liu Xiaotong, Zhu Ting, Gong Xiangyu, Lin Li, Yan Ni, Yuan Xinyue (themselves), Yao Di (Wei Qiuyue), Zeng Chunlei, Liu Yanhan, Wang Mengjie, Zheng Yixin, Yang Hanyu, Wang Yuanyuan, Wang Lujia (themselves), Chen Zhan (Sun Jinfang), Ma Xuechun (Zhang Rongfang), Li Dongxu (Chen Zhaodi), Mao Wen (Cao Huiying), Liu Chang (Yang Xi), Luo Hui (Zhou Xiaolan), Liu Chenxi (Zhang Jieyun), Li Ziwei (Chen Yaqiong), Ling Min (Zhou Lumin), Li Yangyi (Zhu Ling), Liu Zhenhong (Liang Yan), Zhao Chenlu (Wang Yimei), Xu Wenshan [Audrey Hui] (Bai Lang/Lydia, Lang Ping’s daughter), Halle Johnson (Flo Hyman, US player at 1981 World Cup), Jaqueline Carvalho, Paula Pequeno (themselves, Brazilian players at 2016 Olympics).

Release: 1 Oct 2020 (Hong Kong), 25 Sep 2020 (China).