Ball breaking
Women in Taipei puts Disney+ in the spotlight for denigrating ‘southern’ girls while Netflix reveals football’s murky underworld – aka its governing body – in damning documentary FIFA Uncovered.
Wow, so this is what it feels like,” says Lin I-shan’s aunt, surveying the scene below from the summit of the Taipei 101 skyscraper.
The metaphor is obvious, but no less fitting for it, encapsulating as it does the entire premise of Women in Taipei (Disney+) from the first lines of the opening episode. This is the story of the comparative country bumpkin who wants to make it in the big city – and while I-shan’s is hardly original, her dreamer’s passion remains genuine.
Kwai Lun-mei plays I-shan, a blow-in to Taipei from the southern city of Tainan, where, even at a young age, she was desperate to escape her stay-at-home parents, who couldn’t fathom her aspirations. Keen to have her attend a local college, then take a small-town job, they reckoned without the bigtime inclinations of someone who saw herself as a sophisticate.
Which is where, back in the real world, the trouble began. As reported in the Taipei Times and elsewhere, Women in Taipei allegedly denigrates those from the southern, “slow” end of Taiwan, but also portrays Taipei girls as callous and shallow.
Working on brand-loyalty initiatives for a company selling beauty products to the young and impressionable might seem like something the latter would do. Perhaps it is this apparent evolution into hard-boiled career woman that sees the everambitious I-shan dumping boyfriends whenever her life needs a fillip and her job a professional leg-up. Cue a period of bed-hopping with the swarthy boss (Rhydian Vaughan) hired from overseas.
But although temperamental and surprisingly ruthless, she still requires relationship counselling from close friend and confessor Hsu Hui-ju (Kimi Hsia), who is only too happy to encourage
I-shan to have a fling, then be on hand later to explain why it went wrong.
And despite her work ethic, I-shan often finds herself helplessly drunk when out enjoying Taipei’s nightlife, then relying on a gallant male to see her home safely. Could this be the basis of those stereotyping accusations? Three out of five on the watch-ometer for a series with more intrigue and convolutions than initially suspected.
Foul play
In Sacha Baron Cohen’s 2016 actioncomedy movie The Brothers Grimsby, Penélope Cruz is confronted in a football stadium, during a World Cup, by Cohen (as football fan Nobby) and Mark Strong.
Strong: “Nobby, meet the head of the biggest crime syndicate in the world.” Cohen: “What, she runs Fifa?”
The makers of four-part Netflix documentary FIFA Uncovered might have craved such a splendidly acerbic
gag in their exposé of the tawdry outfit that controls the world’s most popular sport. But there was really no need: the cynicism, egotism, wilful ignorance and venality on show render the Swiss-based shambles risible enough.
Stained by corruption and bouncing from one embarrassing spat to the next as the actual World Cup in Qatar stumbles on, Fifa is eviscerated here in an investigation that reaches back decades to explain how the game’s global guardian became a clearing house for criminals creaming off untold millions from “football development” funds around the world. So rotten did the state of Fifa become (and it did wield something approaching nation-state power) that one day the FBI came calling, ready to bust “the World Cup of fraud”.
So damning is the evidence, so overwhelming the stench of deceit, that for once, even former president Sepp Blatter, forever in disgrace, cannot wheedle his way into any form of forgiveness. And as the Calamity in Qatar bumbles along, it is instructive to remember that sport as a political tool has been here before. Let’s party like it’s 1936.