Written and directed by William North, as his girlfriend prepares to leave for Australia, a professional queuer who drifts through life without urgency finds it easier to share his fears with strangers in line than confront the end of his relationship, spending his final days suspended between waiting, regret, and the comfort of the present moment. Starring: Jude Leese, Laoise Crossan, James Charalambides, Eadin Melham, Taylor Schackmann and Sian Kayleigh.
To make a film in this day and age which taps into that quintessential mumblecore generation, being very much about the journey and not the destination, and really taking your time with it, is a risky move, so does it pay off for National Sport? Not really. The first hurdle it stumbles over is the runtime, unfortunately it’s simply not feasible to sustain itself and hold onto the audience’s attention for two hours with this type of film. Especially because National Sport did not necessarily need to be two hours long, it had a lot of space to tighten itself up to a more reasonable runtime.
That’s another problem National Sport faces throughout, William North tends to sit in scenes for too long, to meander and find a number of unnecessary tangents. At one point, despite the story having no particular link to cinema, it takes viewers on at least a five-minute tour of cinema history in London. It’s one of several indulgent choices, and employing the use of Google maps to do so was an unfortunate choice. It can become fairly repetitive, and with the tone being dour and the directorial style being quite distant, it compounds the issue further.
Although, that’s not to say there isn’t a decent idea at the heart of National Sport, there absolutely is. To have Ian (Jude Leese) attempt to figure out who he really is and what he really wants out of life while running into random strangers giving him unsolicited life advice, in the most British of places, a queue, is a really solid foundation. However, it never feels like Ian really figures anything out, there’s too many meandering gaps between the sporadic conversations, and he has such a listless personality.
National Sport has an interesting idea, but the execution is muddled. It’s meandering and slow, it doesn’t take the opportunity to add in a sense of humour, it gets lost within itself. It needed a harsher hand on the edit to trim down the runtime and create a bigger personality. The tone and design of the film feel like they were crafted at least a decade ago, there’s something about it that’s reminiscent of the late 2000s. It’s a character study without the characters to really sustain it, it has some issues with angles and lighting, it’s relatively indulgent and the dialogue is rough around the edges.
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