Is there anything more stirring than the game of football at its absolute best? To watch the great athletes and teams at work is to be riveted by the geometric intricacy of interplay; the precision of a pass threaded through a seemingly impenetrable mass of bodies; the balletic grace of a fleet-footed dribble; or the superhuman bodily contortion of a spectacular overhead kick. The football pitch is a canvas on which players paint their masterworks, sculpt with space, and craft kinetic poetry, all while a mob of devoted fans compose a raucous symphony from the stands.
Yet for all that beauty, movies that do justice to the thrill and spirit of the sport have historically proven elusive. How can a game so replete with visual delights, and so saturated with personal expression, rank amongst the least cinematic of sports? For avid fans of both football and film, it’s as frustrating as it is mystifying that nobody seems to possess the proper instincts to make a football movie that feels truly, swooningly romantic about a sport that’s always hummed with tension and possibility.
Nobody, that is, except Stephen Chow, that jester from Hong Kong, whose endless arsenal of good-natured, asinine antics wouldn’t make him anyone’s prime candidate to make a totemic football movie. From the moment he first stepped behind the camera on his gleefully juvenile Bond parody From Beijing with Love, Chow has persisted as one of the last great exponents of slapstick tradition, trafficking in a brand of absurd physical comedy that seems positively atavistic these days. His movies, with their simplicity, brazen immaturity, hyperactive visual style, and total lack of cynicism, feel like the works of an eternal teenager, brimming with ideas and idealism.
To watch them feels genuinely liberating, none more so than Shaolin Soccer, his maximalist masterpiece about an underdog group of Shaolin acolytes who must overcome their personal demons, master the game of football, and face off against the malevolent, steroid-enhanced Team Evil to restore dignity and purpose to their lives. Team Shaolin is spearheaded by Sing (Chow), an impoverished Shaolin master who sees football as a means of demonstrating the power of kung fu to the world, and coached by Fung (Ng Man-tat), a disgraced former footballer left destitute and disabled after being beaten by an angry mob for accepting a bribe to throw a match.
It might seem strange to suggest that Shaolin Soccer, a wacky kung fu comedy, remains the purest cinematic expression of the joys of football, but Chow’s commitment to goofy mayhem really does somehow crystallise, rather than obscure, so much of what makes the sport such a singular phenomenon. Chow, predictably, dispenses with any sense of reality, unyoking the football in his movie from the limitations of human biology and terrestrial physics. When the whistle is blown in Shaolin Soccer, logic gives way to total anarchy – all meteoric leaps, flaming overhead kicks, and supersonic headers. It’s football as pure entertainment, a frenetic highlight reel of flamboyant performances and outrageous special effects, as dynamic in its stupidity as any flowing counterattack.
It’s all completely removed from the actual game of football – I can’t say I’ve ever seen a goalkeeper use tai chi to produce a hurricane to wipe out the entire opposition team – but then, why shouldn’t it be? The movie is pure fantasy, unabashedly so, aspiring not for fidelity, but to capture how we envisage ourselves playing the game as kids (or as slightly more grown-up kids), pulverising the ball after an acrobatic leap, or slaloming from our own half to score. What the movie has in abundance that all those other lesser football movies are so desperately lacking is imagination. Like an unrefined, unvarnished young player still revelling in the sheer creativity and inspiration of it all, the endless possibilities of the game, unconcerned with strategy or structure.
But for all the full-blooded flourishes that make the movie’s matchplay so exhilarating, the movie’s greatest thrill is watching its characters embark on their individual journeys of rehabilitation. They rediscover, through the simple act of kicking a ball about with some old friends, parts of their personalities that they’d long ago sacrificed at the altar of modern mundanity. Sing acts as the catalyst for this reclamation, an accidental beating heart for the masses, inspiring people to reignite their old passions with his unapologetic sincerity. Just watch the sequence in which one of his impromptu songs inspires an entire street of total strangers from all walks of life, who’d until that point resigned themselves to the nothingness of modern existence, to erupt into an immaculately choreographed dance routine and resuscitate their old hopes of being great artists.
That dance, with its boundless generosity of spirit, is the movie in a microcosm. Team Shaolin’s journey from a motley crew of amateurs to a cohesive, dynamic outfit isn’t so much about studying the tactical minutiae of the game as it is about shaking off the lassitude that they’ve allowed to calcify in their lives. While their individual creative sparks inform their distinctive styles of play, each disenchanted team member has, like those dancers in the street with their hidden passions, surrendered their old joys to the soul-destroying mundanity of modernity.
In displacing their old passions and bonds of brotherhood, they’ve displaced their identities, simply accepting that they deserve no better than the boredom and abuse that comes with working a shitty job under a shitty boss. The football they play is only as beautiful as it is because of how much it feels like the ultimate act of therapeutic self-expression – their actions on the pitch, whether it’s propelling the ball at lightning speed from their midriff, or striking the ball with such force that it transforms in midair into a flaming tiger, are an extension of all their most profound aspirations. The ball in Shaolin Soccer is a conduit through which a person’s inner world blossoms, allowing them to realise their full potential.
Football is never more exhilarating than when it’s at its messiest, and it’s in supercharging this mess that Chow becomes the perfect filmmaker for the job of making the greatest of football movies. There have been good movies about the experience of being a football fan, and great documentaries about the staggering highs and lows of football’s mercurial geniuses, but Shaolin Soccer still stands alone as the movie that best captures the game’s magical ability to revert us to a juvenile state and reveal to us all the possibilities of a world vibrating with potential. It taps into our most extravagant fantasies of stepping onto the pitch, scoring the most ludicrous goals in the most dramatic of circumstances, and carving ourselves into football folklore. By combining football with the ridiculous, Chow therein finds the sublime.
Published 20 Dec 2023
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