If there’s anything I learned about Japanese sports movies,
it’s that teamwork and hard effort work wonders, and it’s never the outcome
that matters, the journey to get there is always more important. This film is
no less different.
Mao Inoue is Chiaki Nishikawa, a mid-level government
official working in the city of Oita. Oita is a small industrial city, a bit
backwater-ish, and surrounded by other well known prefectures. To revitalize
interest in the town, she decides to form a women’s tug of war team to compete
in the prefectural championships. The problem is, she doesn’t have a team.
Enter a group of housewives working at the local school meal preparation place.
They then join the team in order to save their livelihoods.
The cast is full of quirky, interesting characters, each
with their own issues in life. And here the film has its greatest asset and its
greatest weakness: most of the film isn’t really about the tug of war team,
it’s about the experiences the cast has and their formation as a team. Some
sports movies and anime get into the minutiae of the sport being played, and its
fascinating watching strategies being tossed back and forth. But with a sport
like Tug of War, there isn’t really that much to discuss other than
preparation.
The dramatic tension rises to crazy levels later on in the
film. The Japanese really do like a good cry, and they manage to squeeze tears
out of this dude’s eyes by the end. The
ending is left a bit ambiguous, but as I did say earlier, the end is not as
important as the road we took to get there.
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