Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Soccer upsets the gender game.
The Grandmaster of the football team in Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Soccer is a woman (portrayed by Chinese actress Carina Lau, known best as one of the great beauties in Wong Kar-Wai’s 2046). This tells you that Chow is up to something more than DIE (Diversity-Inclusion-Equity) casting. Chow’s knack for kick-starting martial arts, comedy, and Chinese tradition into a distinctive moviemaking style puts him on a par with silent-movie masters Charles Chaplin and Buster Keaton and with Steven Spielberg’s visceral comedies. Through the spectacular physics of slapstick, Chow can address untold human endeavors, this time cracking us up over the global phenomenon of feminism.
In Kung Fu Soccer, the all-female team Emei competes in an ultimate football tournament, playing for “the Supreme and Invincibles Cup.” Chow highlights how the mettle of their key players Shuang (Xiaofei Zhang) and Yu Long (Dilraba Dilmurat) is also challenged by their personal idiosyncrasies.
Chow’s humanism — call it his comedic and athletic empathy as both actor and auteur — avoids the madness (from gender spokespeople to the trans movement) that consumes the West. Kung Fu Soccer doesn’t satirize women’s sports but celebrates them, as indicated by Carina Lau’s Grandmaster, whose wisdom inspires the young players. (She observes their games and coaches telepathically while playing mah-jongg with other older women.)
East-West cultural contrasts make Kung Fu Soccer slightly remote — Chow plays fast and facetiously with field rules as he exaggerates the ruthlessness of game play — but the film’s thrust is pleasure, plus skill and emotion. Former best friends, orphan Shuang and heiress Yu Long recall their childhood first meeting and how they used principles of kung fu to humiliate little-boy players. After Long quit sports for a marriage that failed and Shuang suffered her own insecurity, they reconcile for the big tournament opposing heartthrob rival coach Xu Feng (Yixing Zhang).
For Chow, these female jocks represent an absolute. Their talents and abilities evoke unified legend and heritage (Zhang is a Chinese actress and model, and Dilmurat is an ethnic Uyghur singer and model). Chow introduces each team as the players enter the stadium, as in Walter Hill’s The Warriors: Team Golden Dragon in orange satin; Team Ganges in silver; Team Pear Blossom in pink; Team Coral in yellow with black stripes; Team Grand River in black-collar jackets with copper-striped bodices, and team Emei in red with white shoulder stripes. It’s all flash, causing game announcers to hype that they’re enigmatic, unpredictable, and ready to push the limits of human capability.
The extended game play is like watching a movie musical with successive numbers. Chow combines human dexterity, fantasy elasticity, even dance, adding Michael Jackson moonwalking to the Golden Rooster one-leg stance. (One Emei teammate even strikes the Jean-Claude Van Damme splayed-leg pose.) Chow emphasizes cartoon violence slapstick over smart-ass Ted Lasso sitcom dialogue.
It is the purity of Chow’s filmmaking zeal that accounts for his popularity as one of the highest grossing filmmakers in China’s history, with such hits as Shaolin Soccer in 2001, Kung Fu Hustle (2004), Journey to the West (2013), and The Mermaid (2016). Chow’s spectacular soccer sequences and special effects can be dazzling — a digital marvel that delivers the visual and cerebral texture of film. The amazing stunts — Golden Bell Shield blocking an enormous mace ball, the giant marble-eyed tiger rampaging on the field, the soccer ball that’s kicked for miles before landing with a ton of force that makes a crater — work like mirages that also convey the girls’ emotions. Chow’s bloody game mishaps, from contusions to spittle and neon-bright blood are slapstick realism, much like Adam Sandler’s in The Ridiculous 6. These super-fast images carry the weight of both artistic contemplation and readable composition.
And it all comes down to Chow’s Chaplin-Keaton sense of character. His image of Shuang’s on-field petulance, pouting and swinging her long black hair acknowledges a specific feminine essence. Grandmaster advises her on romance, on how to be a woman, and on the ethics of violence, in ways denied by the freakish sisterhood of the Wicked movies and KPop Demon Hunters. Chow has made a feminist classic — the ultimate man-in-girls’-sports movie — without the treacherous manipulation that infects Western pop culture.
