Ping Pong (2003)

I first saw table tennis played seriously when I was in high school.  Up until then I played it in an almost desultory manner, whereby my body rarely left contact with the playing surface, I was that close to the table at all times. One of my high school friends was Asian, and some of my favorite memories are times we spent at an Indonesian family friend's. The reasons are two-fold. The food was incredible, voluminous, and almost overwhelming in it's abundance (when I encountered Rijsttafel on a future trip to Holland, I was almost underwhelmed--the real Indonesian table groans with food). The second was that the sons played ping pong like I had never seen it played before. Unbelievably, they worked up a sweat playing, and they were a body length away from the table when the action heated up. It was breathtaking to watch table-side. Since that time, the only exposure that I have had to table tennis like that is at the Olympics. This film is set in Japan, and the main characters have been playing ping pong all their lives. It is a part of how they express their personalities. The friendship is between Peco, a cocky youth, and his introspective childhood friend, called 'Smile' because he never does. Smile has great talent and Peco has confidence--when Smile lets his talent out, he crushes Peco's confidence, and the movie is about how Peco claws to get it back. There is a lot of cultural context to be found in the background of the movie, and the story of how their relationship with each other and the game evolves over time is very good.