"Take great care of your knees and legs."
This was a memorable piece of advice I read from a top ten list of most common advice from old people. This tip was constantly on my mind throughout Leap, a film about the Chinese Women's Volleyball team, where the female players continually jump, dive, and slam their joints on the gym floor in its unrelentingly grueling training sequences.
Director Peter Chan, who is a master of telling intimate stories using the little details, captures the generational spirit of the Chinese Women's Volleyball starting from Deng Xiaoping's China going through economic reform in the 1980s onto the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Leap functions like a mosaic, using both the macro and the micro to show the 30-year history of the Chinese Women's Volleyball Team. This rule-bending approach was executed superbly as it retains both the epic and the intimate qualities of the narrative. A screenwriting teacher would teach that it's essential to have a clear protagonist and the film ticks that box loosely with Lang Ping and Chen Zhonghe, the current and former head coach of Women's Volleyball. Ultimately, the main character in Leap is the team itself.
The stakes are high in these matches. The volleyball matches featured in Leap recreate the exact Olympic matches, with the help of the current Chinese Women's National Volleyball Team. The matches are thrilling and executed with a historic accuracy down to the very last detail, as if the film was a historical re-enactment itself.
Along with all the best sports movies out there, Peter Chan lets the audience viscerally experience the infectious power of sports and how a victory really can bring up a nation's spirit, as we've seen in Dangal for India, or Invictus for South Africa or Rocky IV for the US.
Gong Li plays Lang Ping in a straight non-showy way with a full awareness that she is just one small cog in a larger machine. She has the easier job actually. Lydia Bai, the actress who plays the young version of Lang Ping, actually does more of the physical heavy lifting in the first half establishing the Lang Ping character in her athletic years.
When Huang Bo showed up as the head coach Cheng Zhonghe, I was a bit worried he may have been miscast because of his natural comic sensibilities. Any line that comes out of Huang Bo's mouth naturally transforms into a punchline. Thankfully, that didn't happen too often. Huang Bo adds warmth and tenderness that helps ground the movie. Whenever the story starts to be about the country for too long and starts forgetting about its characters, Huang Bo and Gong Li helped snap it back into place.
Like a history teacher speeding through a lesson, Leap is busy-minded and rapidly edited. It helps to sit in the back row, which I didn't. Often, it's blink and you'll miss it. If you're watching at home, the pause button may be your friend.
The pace of how subtitles and title cards live and die within a blink of an eye in Chinese films and I wish they were given more time to breathe. The general rule is you should be able to read the card twice.
Leap is well done. It's ambitious and yet it hits its mark as both a thrilling sports film and also an inspiring historical biopic that captures an era.
