‘Witches of the Orient’ Review: Colorful, Thoughtful, Cinematic Essay on a Legendary Volleyball Team
Three years ago, filmmaker Julien Faraut, a documentarian attached to France’s Institute National de Sport, took a trove of John McEnroe footage and crafted the dazzling “In the Realm of Perfection,” a foundational text in the emergent micro-genre of the sports-documentary-that’s-not-really-about-sport. His new film, “Witches of the Orient,” may substitute volleyball for tennis, and loosely sketch out the Japanese women’s team that dominated the sport in the early 1960s, but it shares many of the hallmarks: a dreamy, glitchy, immersive soundtrack, a crackling editing style and a facility with 16mm archive footage that practically puts you inside its gorgeous grain.
But where the focus of “Realm” was so narrow that its peculiar thesis — that tennis and filmmaking are somehow analogous — emerged with thrilling clarity, “Witches” never quite finds its own unifying principle. And so for all the film’s playful artistry, the effect is more scattershot. Sometimes it’s almost self-contradictory,...
But where the focus of “Realm” was so narrow that its peculiar thesis — that tennis and filmmaking are somehow analogous — emerged with thrilling clarity, “Witches” never quite finds its own unifying principle. And so for all the film’s playful artistry, the effect is more scattershot. Sometimes it’s almost self-contradictory,...
- 7/7/2021
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
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