Big sports high that time forgot
As the 1960s made way for the 1970s, Mexico was on an astonishing sporting roll. First came the 1968 Olympic Games with the Fosbury flop, Bob Beamon’s huge long-jump and the iconic Black Power salutes. Only two years later there was the World Cup, shown in colour and featuring arguably the best Brazilian team the world has ever seen.
But it’s often forgotten – indeed, a new film would say because it’s been completely wiped from the record books – that there was a third big sporting event in Mexico. In 1971 the country hosted the Women’s World Cup.
More than 50 years on, the 110,000 spectators who packed into the Azteca stadium to watch the final between Mexico and Denmark still holds the record for the biggest crowd ever to watch a women’s sporting event. And yet it is almost completely forgotten.
Copa 71, a powerful, enraging and unexpectedly moving documentary, co-produced by Serena and Venus Williams among others, explains why. By the late 1960s, women’s football, after decades of disapproval, bans and, in some countries even being made a criminal offence, was finally in the ascendancy, revitalised by Women’s Lib and the revolutionary spirit of the rule-breaking age.
Co-directors Rachel Ramsay and James Erskine tell this initially uplifting story quite brilliantly. Kicking off with America’s double World Cup-winning Brandi Chastain shamefacedly admitting that she’d never heard of the 1971 tournament, we then hear from the women who played in it – from Italy, Argentina, Mexico, Denmark, France and England.
Full of wonderful contributions, this is a film that makes you laugh out loud at times and moves you to tears at others. Vindication Swim should be the perfect companion piece, in that it’s about another forgotten moment in women’s sport when, in 1927, Mercedes Gleitze, born in Britain but of German descent, became the first British woman to swim the English Channel. It’s a tremendous story and the stuff of newspaper headlines at the time, particularly once the second British woman to swim the Channel only a few days later was exposed as a cheat. Unfortunately, this sluggish dramatisation, played out in an unconvincing mix of black-andwhite and colour, falls well short in every department.
Peter Farrelly made his name making films such as Dumb And Dumber and There’s Something About Mary. And although he’s matured and even won two Oscars for Green Book, he hasn’t grown up entirely, as Ricky Stanicky clearly shows. Certain key bits of character background just aren’t repeatable in a family newspaper.
But the central idea is a clever one – three panicking boys invent a made-up friend, Ricky Stanicky, to take the blame for a Halloween prank but continue with the pretence long into adulthood – and it is well executed by a cast that includes John Cena, Zac Efron and William H Macy.
Ava DuVernay is best known as the director of the Martin Luther King drama, Selma, but her latest project, Origin, is a less commercial dramatisation of Isabel Wilkerson’s American best-seller, Caste: The Origins Of Our Discontents.
The book posits that the big problem facing so many societies is not race but caste. It’s slow but well acted and packs a real moral punch, despite Wilkerson’s tragedy-hit personal life (three people close to her die) sometimes getting in the way of the big ideas she and DuVernay are trying to advance. A tough watch but worthwhile.
‘It still holds the record for the biggest crowd ever to watch a women’s event’