One of the few souvenirs that I have of the 2018 edition of Transilvania IFF is a sublime video-essay about tennis player John McEnroe. The bearer of a remarkable flair when it comes to passing from analyses to lyrical epiphanies, Julien Faraut, the filmmaker behind In The Realm of Perfection (2018), returns to sports archives in search of even more – more mythologies, more ideology, more cinema.

The Witches of the Orient (2021) promised everything, all the way down to a satisfactory title. The witches are not indeed sorceresses, but former volleyball players; some of them legendary, part of the team that took the world by storm in the sixties by scoring 258 consecutive victories, to the degree that the Soviet press bestowed this moniker onto them as a means to baptize such an ineffable state of affairs. On Faraut’s hands, their story is made out of three species of material – recent interviews that the filmmaker took in a recent visit to Japan, French sports documentaries from the sixties in which their big games and petty cantonments are immortalized, and glimpses of themed animes that became chic in Japan after their tele-rise-to-fame. 

A few years later, the French journals found the appropriate wording – these twenty-, thirty-something year old women, united under the flag of the proletarian Nichibo Kaizuka team, are going through sheer hell at the training sessions led by Hirofumi Daimatsu; all in order to achieve heaven on earth, that is, the crowning of the post-war efforts of Japan attempt at making an about-face. Without victory, as they giggly say, they’d move to Romania.

The director is unable to find the same narrative in the women’s own words, as they are now of old age – this was their youth, painful yet beautiful, and not any less glorious. The film is weighed down by the aspect of the recent footage, which is terribly plain. A compromise can be felt in this regard, precisely in terms of negotiating intimacy. We witness routines, but not emotions – a modest reunion, a bus tour, sports classes, training, even a phone call with the daughter of a former colleague who is now suffering from an illness. Thrown in together with biographical sparks, some of them painful, yet recounted in a light tone, Faraut’s result is coherent, yet bland. The players’ hesitancy to watch their six-days-a-week training regiments with open eyes and a closed heart seals the entire deal – the days of their youth remain in their owners’ hands. 

Good thing that Faraut is a master filmmaker; an essayist, but especially a bricoleur. We already know that sports is the highest form of cinema, as it has been proved by the most diverse of people, be it Leni Riefenstahl, Serge Daney, or Corneliu Porumboiu. What is remarkable about the story of the volleyball players at Nichibo Kaizuka is how striking it proved to be for Japanese pop culture, and how many times it was represented in manga and anime.

When the master, i.e. not owner, of the material is none other than Faraut, the filmmaker cuts and cuts until he gets a full and playful remix that is nonetheless gleaming. In particular, pieces from a documentary that present the 1962 match between the Soviets and the Japanese are bursting to the rhythm of trip-hop, rounded by inserts from a genre anime called Attack No. 1 (1970). Elsewhere, still bursting, the footage of the athletes’ training sessions seems to upend the screen – it spins, it undulates, it stops for a moment, and then starts anew. Where can one still find such generous filmmakers? The suspense that transpires once a playball is set into motion is well-known. But to combine it with anime’s nonchalant technique of underlining it, using its trademark tricks which makes every body spin into a triple pirouette before a grandiose maneuver, that is to truly understand the charm of motion pictures. Sometimes, cinema is only about gift-giving, and Faraut knows to choose the ones that make us truly jubilant.

Move! Receive!, the club music bellows. In a documentary that’s much more about national anthems. 

Călin Boto

Film critic and journalist. He is an editor at AARC and writes the ”Screens” features for Art Magazine. He collaborates with many publications and film festivals as a freelancer and he is strangely attached to John Ford's movies.