NYAFF Review: Ski Jumping Pairs: The Road to Torino 2006

The New York Asian Film Festival is celebrating its fifth birthday this year with its largest-ever slate of films: 25 features on just two screens, most of which are making their New York or US debuts. The festival is dedicated to exploring "the latest and greatest movies from Asia," and the 2006 line-up includes works from Japan, China, Korea, India, Thailand, and Malaysia. The festival runs from June 15 to July 1; watch the official website for ticket and showtime information.

With its mix of serious documentary-style footage and outrageous CGI, Ski Jumping Pairs: Road to Torino 2006 is nothing if not unusual. The film, co-directed by Riichiro Mashima and Masaki Kobayashi, grew out of a CGI short about people ski jumping together (not side-by-side, mind you -- on the same set of skis) made by Mashima in 2002; Kobayashi directs the live-action sequences. The idea of pairs ski jumping is a very funny one and, indeed, parts of the movie are hilarious. But it bogs down in the middle, and so frequently derails itself that audiences are left wondering what might have been.Framed as an tripartite NHK documentary, the movie is hosted by Shosuke Tanihara, a blandly handsome, painfully sincere correspondent who, one assumes, is carefully mocking the types that host most actual Japanese television docs. The problem for American audiences, of course, is that while Tanihara's constant use of words like "tragedy" and "miracle," and the accompanying reliance on Dramatic Pauses is funny, most of the sharpest humor is lost on us. Guided by this most earnest of hosts, viewers are introduced to Dr. Toshifumi Harada, the physicist who created ski jumping pairs. Through about its first third, the movie plays it completely straight, carefully explaining Harada's strange discovery that, under certain conditions, material below freezing tends to replicate itself in search of stability.

Because the best mockmentaries rely for their effectiveness on at least a vague possibility that the stories they tell could be true, this early section of Ski Jumping Pairs is incredibly frustrating. Not only is there not even any fake scientific logic to Harada's "Rendezvous Theory" (Ice pops and mice spontaneously replicate, somehow, because it's cold. Why this never happened until Harada started to pay attention is never discussed.), but how it led him to create ski jumping pairs is also unclear. Since it is on these things that the entire story is based, the carelessness in setting them up in incredibly frustrating, and makes the movie's leap into absurdity less explosive than it might have been.

It's not until Harada makes a deal with ski jumping's overseeing body  in an effort to get his new sport approved for World Cup competition that the movie first truly takes flight. Assured that the sport will be welcomed if jumpers can successfully complete 108 jumps in a row -- known as the "Millennium 108" because the attempt was made during the night of December 31, 1999 -- Harada sets out to recruit teams. In addition to his twin sons, he lines up increasingly strange pairs from Germany (led by the world's greatest ski jumper, a man with huge mutton-chop whiskers and a baby panther he strokes constantly, Bond villain-style), Finland (twin brothers who bake bread "hard enough to be a weapon"), and Norway (next-door neighbors who are a team because God spoke to one, and told him to love his neighbor), all of whom gather in Nagano to go for the 108.  As a secret weapon to aid the effort's success, Harada enlists "legendary professional wrestler" Antonio Inoki to instill "samurai spirit" in the skiers. What transpires here is easily the movie's high point: It shifts into CGI for the first time and goes in such an unexpected direction that it's impossible not to react with shocked, hysterical laughter. Suffice to say the skiers are left in terror, with wind-blown blood running down their faces by the end of the night.

After such an astonishing, gleeful shift, however, the movie falters significantly in its middle third. The last section of the film, which features a welcome, albeit too long, return to CGI, restores a degree of raucous good-humor (the "Bermuda Incident" is particularly inspired), but Mashima and Kobayashi are ultimately unable to regain to the heights they reached with the Millennium 108. That said, however, Ski Jumping Pairs: The Road to Torino 2006 is certainly weird (and short) enough to be worth the cost of a ticket, particularly for those with a knowledge of Japanese television.