TRIBUTES AND RETROSPECTIVES

Sport and cinema

Shaolin Soccer

Siu Lam juk kau

Stephen Chow
2001 - China / - 1h53

Screenings : wednesday 24 - 10:15 pm - Pathé - 1 friday 26 - 4:30 pm - Pathé - 1

When former footballer Fung is sacked from his work at Team Evil, he comes across Sing, a monk from the famous Shaolin temple who is living on the streets. One day, Fung watches Sing run rings round a gang of youths with a single football. Fung has the ingenious idea of creating a Shaolin football team.

“Far from the works of Wong Kar-Wai or Tsui Hark, Shaolin Soccer is in the more humorous vein of Hong Kong cinema. Fuelled by the inexhaustible source of parody, the film explores the island's traditional cinema genres through pure silliness. The incongruous blend of martial arts, shaolin, wu xia pan, with football creates a unique hybrid, a sort of kung foot. (…) The film gets off to a screeching start, and keeps up the pace right through to the end, supported by a hilarious story and a few diversions into musicals or westerns. The craziness comes to a head on the pitch when a group of ragged old Shaolin monks gathered together by Sing perform some incredible moves. Each one of them has a special power, some defy the laws of gravity (despite one of them weighing over 100 kg), spinning and juggling the ball upside-down, all in front of the inscrutable gaze of the unbeatable goalie, a hilarious Bruce Lee lookalike dressed in the same yellow pyjamas as the master. In the final, the opposition between the Shaolin and the team of baddies uses the codes of the Nike commercials (good against bad) but with Puma as the organiser. It is an opportunity for the challenger brand to wheedle its way into the special effects (a ball kicked at the speed of sound takes the shape of Puma's logo before burning through the back of the net) and to out-nike Nike by putting them on the bad losers' side. Shaolin Soccer bows down to its ancestral models and, after making fun of them, choses to make Shaolin codes triumph rather than those of football.” (Laurent Robert; Chronic'art)

CAST AND CREW

Cast : Stephen Chow, Man-Tat Ng, Wei Zhao, Yin Tse, Hui Li
Screenplay : Stephen Chow, Kan-Cheung Tsang, Min-Hun Fung, Chi-Keung Fung
Cinematography : Pak-Suen Kwan, Ting-Wo Kwong
Sound : Chi-Tat Leung
Editing : Kit-Wai Kai
Music : Ying-Wah Wong

Production : Star Overseas, Universe Entertainment

French distributor : Park Circus