The beautiful game has one of the lowest bars to entry of any sport in the world. Soccer — which will be called by its proper name, football, from here on in — only requires a ball to play. Any flat surface can be turned into a pitch if you don’t have access to a regulation-sized field. That elegance, and the game’s simple rules, has helped make it a global phenomenon. Outside of the cash and influence of the corrupt bureaucracy of FIFA, soccer endures because the opportunities the sport affords are open to anyone with a passion for the game. 3.4 billion viewers — nearly half the planet — tuned in to the World Cup this year. Just as anyone can play, anyone can watch and immediately understand the action that unfolds. Moreover, you’ll never have to endure an eight-hour and twenty-five-minute match. There are few entertainments as pure and enjoyable as football, but one man believes the sport has got it all wrong.
At first glance, Laurentiu Ginghină comes across as an unremarkable and unexpected subject for Corneliu Porumboiu’s amusing and wry documentary “Infinite Football.” However, it doesn’t take long to understand why the director turned the camera on the brother of his childhood friend. Ginghină opens the film explaining how his own dreams of playing football ended when an opposing player kicked him so hard he fractured his fibula. After his leg had healed, he broke it again, and his ambitions of taking forestry studies — which required a running test as part of the entrance exams — were also dashed. These are not the only aspirations that Ginghină shares throughout the film that have also not come to fruition, but it’s his current, Tartarus-like challenge of changing the rules of football entirely that earns perhaps the greatest sympathy, even if its maddeningly exasperating in its convoluted futility.
To explain the ever-changing adjustments Ginghină comes up with for fixing the game — from creating an octagonal field to dividing the pitch into six sections — would be the beside the point. It’s his intention on “freeing the ball” that drives his obsession. In Ginghină’s mind, the rules of football do not allow the full potential for the ball to travel up and down the field with maximum speed and ease. According to him, how players are positioned on the pitch is the exacerbating factor, and it’s a riddle Ginghină is eager to solve. However, when Porumboiu films a local team putting Ginghină’s new rules into practice it quickly becomes clear the adjustments only serve to handicap the already fluid nature of the sport. This hardly perturbs Ginghină who believes he’s only at the cusp of evolving the game, creating “version 2.0,” with the possibility of more updates to come.
When he’s not busy examining his perceived deficiencies in football, Ginghină spends his days toiling as a local bureaucrat solving land transfer issues, in an office that’s even drabber than the occupation sounds. That location also serves as the centerpiece for the film’s longest and most enjoyable sequence, where Ginghină recounts with charming melancholy the trajectory of his life that has seen his various pursuits outside of his homeland ultimately fail and end with a return to Romania. As he shares these stories, Ginghină becomes embroiled in the hilarious monotony of interdepartmental red tape in getting some answers about a land claim from an elderly woman and her son who burst into his office. By comparison, solving football’s shortcomings must seem a breeze.
Porumboiu knows what a gift he has in Ginghină, a compelling storyteller, with an eloquent knack for the poetic, and the preposterous. Few would use Plato’s cave allegory and the Bible in making their case for changing football, but then again, there are few people quite like Ginghină. To this end, Porumboiu rarely pushes back on his subject, allowing the viewer to connect Ginghină’s desire to free the ball to the defeats in his own life, or how trying to find in order in soccer is not unlike the country around him navigating its post-communist existence, and finding its purpose within the European Union. Ginghină’s mission may seem foolish, but by the end of “Infinite Football,” it becomes clear his flame of competition, despite a lifetime of setbacks, hasn’t for one moment been extinguished. [B+]
“Infinite Football” is now playing at New York City’s Museum of the Moving Image with a national rollout to follow.