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SDAFF Report: Mongolian Ping Pong Review
Posted by Peter Martin at 10:22pm.
Posted in Film & DVD Reviews , Drama, Asia, Random Festival News.
As the San Diego Asian Film Festival swings into full action, here’s our correspondent Wells Dunbar with a highlight from Friday night’s program, a review expanded from an article he wrote for the festival. The film will be released by First Run Features in a Region 1 DVD edition on October 24.
As a meditation on globalization and modernity, it’s telling that a viewer’s first frame of reference for the rolling green steppes pervading the gorgeously-lensed Mongolian Ping Pong is the default Windows wallpaper. It’s like someone took those rolling fields, trapped in 1024x768 resolution on your desktop, and dropped them in head-snappingly gorgeous 35 millimeter.
Anachronistic touches like this abound—a 4X4 emblem ripped off a truck and put on a horse, for instance, or a copy of Vogue appearing so otherworldly as to come from Mars, not America—but unlike an obvious antecedent, The Gods Must Be Crazy, the film is predicated on an abiding respect for its characters and a slightly melancholy sweetness.
After a ping pong ball floats down a stream into a decidedly rural Inner Mongolian village, three precocious kids—Biike, Dawa and Erguotuo—spend their days arguing over its purpose (Biike’s grandmother’s insistence that it’s a “glowing pearl” from the river spirits is an early favorite). Fleeting glimpses from the developed world, brought by a huckstering traveling salesman, nudge the boys into returning the ball to whom they think is its rightful owner, but Mongolian Ping Pong isn’t about plot.
The ambling, naturalistic tone and lack of incidental music recalls Zhang Ke Jia’s works (The World, Unknown Pleasures, but especially Platform), especially a sequence inspiring Biike’s sister to join a traveling troupe of performers. But director Hao Ning forgoes Jia’s urban cacophony, and his sometimes caustic world view, in creating a film as well worn as Biike’s family hut.
It’s telling that as the film ends, the family is moving out, and Biike is moving on, into the world at large from the beautiful one he knew. And that’s no hyperbole—amazingly helmed by a first time director and cinematographer, Mongolian Ping Pong joins that pantheon of films so beautiful, any shot could be pulled at random and framed.
Official Site--US (Embedded Quicktime Trailer)
Review by Wells Dunbar
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