Not every story either deserves or needs a narrative dramatization in the form of a Hollywood or similarly budgeted adaptation, but here is a documentary, propulsive in both form and content, in which multiple smaller stories are unearthed as part of the bigger one and reveal themselves to be readymade for such adaptation. As an example, there’s the moment when a referee at one of the various bracketed match-ups in the 1971 Women’s World Cup, taking place in Mexico City, forces a shot at the goal for one of the players and takes charge of repositioning the ball himself, only to disqualify the goal after she gets it into the net. That’s the kind of microaggression (or would that be a macroaggression?) that rests at the core of why many reading this review of Copa 71, with only general or the “official” knowledge of professional football/soccer in mind, are furrowing their eyebrows a bit.
After all, wasn’t the first official Women’s World Cup of any sort in 1991, as hosted and recorded by Féderation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA)? To Brandi Chastain, who was on the American teams that won said World Cup in that inaugural year and later in 1999, the news that an entire championship’s worth of games was held in Mexico 20 years before is a pretty major news alert. Directors Rachel Ramsey and James Erskine smartly and pointedly begin their documentary by breaking this bit of news to Chastain, whose bemused expression says everything. She, like us by the end of this movie, is delighted to learn of such an event and infuriated to find out that it was more or less hidden from the public record.
Those in the top ranks of FIFA certainly would like to sweep the entire period under the rug, and it comes as little surprise that, long before the different but equally aggravating conversation currently being had about issues of gender in the sports world, a very similar one was at the fiery center of this slice of history. Long before the events detailed here, the South American country of Brazil made it a jailable offense for women to play the sport in public, and even the comparatively enlightened English associations sullied their own future reputations by hocking nonsense from medical “journals” about the sex-specific injuries that could be attained by female participation in any sport.
After the opening act of the movie details all the ways in which women were limited in their participation, until progress was made incrementally to allow some doors to open, it moves into the more familiar but still exciting material following the formation of the team that would ultimately compete at the ’71 Cup. We meet the various players, see clips of their most notable achievements before and during their stint, and hear from their mouths what events made them proud and which ones disappointed them.
All of that is absorbing in its own right, mostly because we know these were talented athletes at the top of their game. Ramsay and Erskine use their incredible access to potentially dozens of hours of footage to put us right in the middle of those matches, too, resulting in a propulsive piece of entertainment that easily outdoes most dramatic and fictional counterparts in the movies. It’s the compelling drama of reality, after all, and that’s why documentaries so often upstage other forms of media.
Copa 71 eventually, though, returns to the idea of this piece of history as a hidden and supposedly shameful thing by reckoning with the immediate aftermath of this World Cup. Men only invite the women from one of these teams to a public speaking event for the specific purpose of mocking their achievements. This happens after Denmark has taken the crown in a sporting event wherein one of the games garnered the largest audience in the history of any such event in women’s sports. The malevolent hypocrisy of such displays is righteously angering, but here is a documentary that channels its anger toward setting right the official record.
Photo courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment
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