★½
“As dull as a 0-0 draw.”
Football is known as “The beautiful game,” but you wouldn’t know it based on this documentary, which seems perversely intended to remove anything like that from its topic. It focuses on Olimpia Szczecin, a women’s soccer team in Poland, as they prepare for the coming season. There’s your first problem. Team sports like this are inherently about conflict: there are winners and losers, but these are not determined on the practice field, and that’s where the film spends the bulk of its time. It’s simply not very interesting, unless you have a thing for watching women amble around a park, kicking balls at each other, jumping over low hurdles or being yelled at by their coach (Baginska).
There’s simply no narrative here which can attract interest. There are any number of threads which could have been used, if the film had bothered to explore or even explain them. For example, you’re never told – I had to Google this – that these players are actually amateurs rather than pros, so there’s the potential issue of striking a balance between their day jobs and their passion. Though we never see much “passion”. The only time the film reaches any genuine enthusiasm is when we see a coaching session for young girls, about the only ones in the entire documentary, who appear to be enjoying themselves. The coach also speaks about the importance of dealing with her players’ personal problems and keeping them off the pitch. Yet we never see this happening in any meaningful way.
A football season is inherently dramatic, fortunes ebbing and flowing over the course of meaningful competitive games. Yet this peters out before the campaign begins, robbing us of that tension. The entire season is instead described in a short series of terse captions. What little footage of actual play we see, is disjointed and impossible to get excited about. For example, they reach the final of an indoor tournament, where we’re told they are wearing white shirts, while their opponents are in blue. Except, the entire film is, for no good reason, shot in black-and-white and consequently, you can’t tell which side is which.
Outside of Baginska yelling at people, there’s no sense of any of the players having personalities or lives off the pitch. Why do they play? What are their goals? [Pun not intended] The film seems supremely disinterested in… Well, anything, to be quite honest. Rather than turning up with a story to tell, or even looking to find one, it feels as if they simply showed up for eight weeks in the off-season, due to an error in scheduling, but shrugged and made their film anyway. The irony is that, certainly in the UK, the women’s game has never been bigger, thanks largely to the English team winning the 2022 European Championships. If you told me this film was made by some American dude, to prove the validity of his belief that soccer is the dullest sport on Earth, I would believe you.
Dir: Miguel Gaudêncio
Star: Natalia Baginska, Roksana Ratajczyk, Kinga Szymanska, Weronika Szymaszek