Culture

Rating: 2.5/5

Ping Pong is a documentary that follows eight competitors at the World Over-80s Table Tennis Championships in China. These elderly sportspeople include such characters as terminally ill Terry from Great Britain, 85-year-old Texan first-timer Lisa and 100-year-old ping pong superstar Dorothy from Australia. The film opens with interviews with the contestants in their homes before cracking into the game play, where more sporadic interview footage works to explain our eight competitors’ psychology.

As lovely as the competitors’ interviews are, it seemed as though the director didn’t know what to do with the footage. This film has no idea what it’s trying to say. For the most part, it’s an examination of death – both what it is like to lose someone, and preparing to lose yourself. But this seems coincidental more than anything; the theme is not properly highlighted and not every competitor discusses moving on. It appears there wasn’t a standard set of interview questions used for each interviewee, and while this gave the film a great sense of variation, it robbed it of any real focus.

Ping Pong is unfortunately weak on the technical side. Apart from the brilliant intro credits (which involve computer animated ping pong tables), the graphics tended to be amateurish and included only intermittently throughout the movie. The directors also seemed to enjoy filming television screens playing news casts about the tournament, which isn’t exactly a blast to watch. Even more frustratingly, viewers are forced to watch the opening ceremony via another fuzzy television screen – clearly the directors were denied filming rights at this event.

What saves this film is the eight ping pong players, whose stories of war, grandchildren and their deceased spouses are funny and heartfelt. You will be confronted with the reality of just how hard it is to grow old. In one soul-crushing monologue our German first-timer tells us how she stopped eating after her husband died, because nothing tastes good dining alone.

At the end of the day, this film is sweet, but poorly made. Give it a watch if you’re prepared to pick out the significant moments yourself.