A sports movie is a powerful thing. After all, what is a story without conflict, and what is an athletic competition if not a confrontation? You don’t have to know anything about boxing to understand what boxing means to Rocky Balboa. You don’t need to study baseball stats to care what happens to the Rockford Peaches. Every character brings their drama with them onto the court, or the ring, or the diamond, or the dodecahedron, or wherever the hell they’re playing. A sports movie is a tale of inner struggle writ large, as a saga of impressive physical feats. Text and subtext, indivisible.
I don’t even like sports very much, but I love sports movies, and Kenji Iwaisawa’s “100 Meters” is a special kind of sports movie. It’s about athletes who use track and field — in particular, the 100-meter dash — to find their purpose in life. But instead of finding it, most of them get stuck in an existential quagmire. After all, you can’t run in a straight line for decades without eventually wondering why you bother. The runners in “100 Meters” aren’t trying to save a youth center or even prove a point. They don’t run because of contrivance. They run because they’re runners, and sometimes that horrifies them. Dear god, what if that’s all they are, and nothing else?
“100 Meters” is a story that spans many years and many runners, but mostly it’s the tale of Togashi, a natural athlete, and Komiya, who has no natural talent whatsoever. But Togashi has no meaningful motivation to run, and Komiya runs obsessively, in a desperate, never-ending race to escape his own life. Komiya pushes himself so hard, willing himself past the breaking point, ignoring his pain and injuries. It’d be inspiring if it wasn’t so dangerous. In most conventional sports narratives he’d be an aspirational figure, and maybe in some ways he is, but as his classmate screams at him, he’s also literally killing himself. And for what?
Togashi inspires people. He’s handsome, well-mannered, and takes his celebrity seriously. He’s doing everything right, and it leads him down a path to ruination, because everything he’s achieved stems from his talent, and talent inevitably fades. When he grows up and sees two young children running on the playground, he gives them helpful advice about how to improve their racing times. Then he collapses in a puddle of tears and failing muscles, wondering where the hell his life went, and what — if anything — he has left.
We meet other track and field stars. Philosophical leaders, fallen idols, even some people who are only in it for fun. But we keep coming back to Togashi and Komiya, who let one part of their lives dominate everything else, under the strange belief that all their problems can be solved by proving they’re faster than everybody else. It’s a doctrine that destroys them whenever they lose, and losing is inevitable as they keep playing. They’re flinging themselves headlong into their own destruction, and they can only run in a straight line, so if they want to succeed, they have to stop focusing on their physical strength, and concoct a whole new philosophy.
Kenji Iwaisawa’s film, based on the manga by Toto (“Orb: On the Movements of the Earth”), alternates between jagged, harsh-lined momentum and absolute stillness. The 100-meter dash is a magic tunnel, a wormhole in space, and it leaves traces in those who travel through it. But when they’re not running, the characters in “100 Meters” are thinking. They challenge each other’s belief systems. They want to know how their rivals push through the pain and insecurity, and many of them have different ways of transcending the physical plane.
It’s a film about philosophy and momentum, and the philosophy of momentum itself. It may not have the melodramatic energy of most popular sports movies, but it’s putting the methodology of all those other movies under a microscope. It’s not content to show us what’s happening, or even to explain why. “100 Meters” wonders aloud why there’s a “why” in the first place, and what it says about the human condition that we go through all this physical conditioning.
It’s a great sports movie about the urge to be great at sports, and it’s one of the smartest movies the genre has produced in a long time.
