[HanCinema's Film Review] "The Ring of Life"

Every four years during the Olympics a large number of athletes in normally obscure sports appear to come out of nowhere. Never mind the top finishers- just getting to the Olympics is a trying ordeal. The bottom half that never even make it past the first round had to work hard just to even be an early loser. "The Ring of Life" demonstrates this struggle. But more importantly it depicts the process. Boxing is a physically daunting and demanding sport. Why go for that in the face of a normal life?

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Traditional narrative sports films use all the basic tropes we see here. There's the grizzled trainer who never made it to the top even though he suffered some rather horrible scars in the process. Evidently he wasn't always so upbeat. And yet in the present day this man betrays no bitterness. To the contrary- he takes joy in having a new boxer under his tutelage, less because there's some sort of old grudge to settle and more almost because boxing is a religion.

Consider this- our heroine has an actual day job. She knows that life exists without boxing, and that even if her dream of heading to the Olympics ultimately fails, life will go on. But no matter what she will always continue boxing, even if not at a semi-professional level, because for her this is an act of mental, physical discipline. If the grizzled trainer's scars are a lesson to his students, it's not that boxing is rough. It's that a guy who can go through all that and amazingly be well-adjusted in the present day is capable of achieving this thanks to the mental fortitude provided by boxing.

In movies, training montages exist solely to demonstrate that the lead character gains a great deal of skill in a short amount of time. "The Ring of Life" take the exact opposite angle, and instead gives us a movie that consists almost enirely of training montages, with very little focus on the actual boxing matches. Which is really just as well. There's no pleasant, upbeat way to show grown women punching each other.

So if you're interested in this movie for the sake of violent thrills and exhibition, look elsewhere. "The Ring of Life" eschews drama for the sake of more meaningful life lessons. This is a movie which emphasizes that a thousand days of preparation for competitions that take place over the course of a single week is really kind of crazy. Nobody does this just for the sake of winning Olympic gold- these people box because they, like everyone else, need a hobby that puts them in a relaxed state of mental focus.

This naturally leads into the obvious problem with "The Ring of Life"- you might not find anything necessarily interesting about a movie that is, for all intents and purposes, a long and apparently pointless training montage. But then that was the main takeaway that I really liked- "The Ring of Life" is a nice, subtle reminder that even literal competitions aren't necessarily that stressful as long as you view them more as self-development than some sort of real-life narative arc. Happiness, after all, is a state of mind that should exist independently of Olympic gold.

Review by William Schwartz

"The Ring of Life" is directed by Lee Jin-hyeok