Film review - Ping Pong

Table tennis is a beautiful game. It takes tenacity, lightning reflexes, mental agility and sheer joy in the game to be good, let alone become a champion. And as director Hugh Hartford’s delightful documentary Ping Pong shows, people can still be playing, and playing well, even as centenarians.

Ping Pong is not your average sports documentary. It sets out to prove that age is no limit when it comes to athletic triumph. This engaging film follows eight pensioners from four different continents (collective age 703) as they compete in the World Over-80s Table Tennis Championships in Inner Mongolia.

Terry (81), once having been given a week to live after having cancer twice, has now set his sights on winning gold. Inge (89) has used table tennis to train her way out of the dementia ward she committed herself to. Australian legend Dorothy deLow is 100, and finds herself a mega celebrity in this rarefied world, and Texan Lisa Modlich, a newcomer at 85, is determined to do whatever it takes to win her first gold. Their tenacious devotion to their sport is summed up by 90-year-old German Ursula who says she would much rather ‘die at the table tennis table than in a care home’.

Hartford skilfully documents each person’s past and present. These folks, once young and beautiful, got married in the time of Hitler; they've raised children now of retirement age themselves. Some are sweet, some reserved; some are mean and some gregarious. The game they play is not the one in their grandchildren's basements, but rather at the grandest gymnasia of world competition. They thwack not just at the ball, but also at the medical severities that restrict their bones and brains.

This isn’t really a film about ping pong or even sport; this is a film about living in the moment and not being afraid of your own mortality, and it puts anyone who’s ever complained about a sore joint to shame.  It explores the link between emotional health and physical well-being and leaves the viewer reflecting on the potential for fullness of life in our later years.  As the tagline puts it, we are ‘Never too old for gold.’

The sight of this elderly bunch hobbling around the table will make you laugh, but the passion with which they play each game as if it might (and probably will) be their last will also make you cry.

This thoughtful, moving and engaging little film is a real triumph.

Review by Martin Barratt

Ping Pong
Genre: Documentary/Sport
Director: Hugh Hartford
Rating: PG (language)
Run time: 1 hr 16 mins