nwasianweekly.com
May 26, 2007

Photo provided by Viz Media

Peco (Yosuke Kubozuka) launches off the ground during a pivotal pingpong match against Dragon (Shidou Nakamura).

Teen angst bounces along in “Ping Pong”

By N.P. Thompson
For the Northwest Asian Weekly

For a movie about a competitive sport, “Ping Pong” bends and subverts the rules of its subgenre with a healthy disregard for the clichés that have long weeded and choked portrayals of athletes on screen. There are no “Rocky”-like pyrotechnics on display, and in an especially daring move, the director Fumihiko Sori dissolves away from a climactic rematch before the game is finished, focusing instead on what comes after and relegating the whole issue of who wins or loses to a photograph framed and hung on a wall.

It’s a fitting choice for a film whose nominal subject is table tennis but whose greater concern is the role memory plays in our lives. “Ping Pong,” based on a manga by Taiyo Matsumoto, traces two unlikely best friends, high schoolers Peco and Smile. (Well, one assumes the boys are in school, even though no one’s ever shown in a classroom and there are no parents in sight at all.) Peco is the brash, outgoing one who has more bravado than substance; Smile, so nicknamed because he never does, wanders ruefully under the weight of some unexplained mystery. The one-named actor Arata, who plays Smile to perfection, not only finds wit in his character’s essential melancholia, but he has the gift of seeming at once a teenager and an old, old man.

As the movie floats ethereally along (pacing itself at the speed of an Ozu film for most of its 114-minute running time), Peco spends his waking hours in a sort of pool hall that has pingpong tables rather than billiards — a cozy dive run by a chain-smoking bleached blonde whom the boys call Granny, though the actress playing her looks about 43. Sori interlaces the present-day scenes with childhood flashbacks bathed in green-gold sunlight. These inserts offer visual clues to the boys’ personal mythologies, but the more compelling moments in Kankuro Kudo’s screenplay stem from the astutely observed interaction between two opposites who need each other.

For example, as the boys ride a train, Peco boasts that he’s going to Europe to become a world champion. Smile asks the deflating question of why, then, is Peco skipping practice. Peco understatedly zings him back, “Conversation with you is so much fun.” Later, as they stroll a beach near Yokohama (cinematographer Akira Sakoh’s wide-angle compositions of cloud-saturated ocean horizons are glorious), the hipster Peco keeps telling his withdrawn buddy that Smile is “cool,” yet only with his back turned to Smile can Peco admit, “I can’t practice without you.” And there’s a fantastic bit involving a girl on the street who fends off Peco’s slovenly advances with “I thought you quit pingpong,” to which he laconically retorts, “I didn’t quit living.” Yosuke Kubozuka, as Peco, does the kind of good acting that seems effortless.

The director loves unusual textures, and nowhere is this more apparent than in a fantasy of a figure buried alive under Ping-Pong balls. You see just a face and then a hand poking up out of an entire frame’s worth of what might as well be eyeballs. Almost as impressive is the “bliss” sequence in which two opponents, in the midst of a heated grudge match, are transported to a background of pure white — the spectators who were around them cease to exist in that place where only the love of the game can take them.

“Ping Pong” plays May 25-31 at the Grand Illusion Cinema, 1403 N.E. 50th St., Seattle. For showtimes and ticket prices, call 206-523-3935 or visit www.grandillusioncinema.org.

N.P. Thompson can be reached at info@nwasianweekly.com.

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