Years ago, I stumbled across posters for the 1988 Russian billiards movie The Story of One Billiard-Room (original title: Istoriya odnoy bilyardnoy komandi). The posters, available through Pop Culture Graphics, were unusual and memorable, striking in comparison to the more typical movie posters seen across the billiards movie landscape.  But, aside from the posters, my research uncovered very little about the film.

The script is by Alexsandr Adabashyan, who has written, acted in, directed, or helped produce well over 40 movies and television shows.  It also features an all-Russian cast, including Sergei Gazarov and Semyon Farada, both of whom are stage and film veterans. But, for all three of these gentlemen, this particular movie seems to have been largely ignored.

The only path that was not a dead-end was researching the movie’s director, Sebastián Alarcón.  Mr. Alarcón is a native of Chile, who left his homeland after graduating college to attend VGIK, a film school in Moscow.  Though he planned to return to Chile to make movies, his efforts were thwarted by a political coup and he was forced to remain in Moscow living in exile. Thus, he then began making movies for Mosfilm, the largest and oldest film studio in Russia.

One of the first films Mr. Alarcón made was a 1977 documentary Night Over Chile, which became immensely popular.  Its success spurred the director to continue making films about Chile, often about dictatorships and political struggle.  It was not until the late ‘80s when Mr. Alarcón turned to lighter subjects.  This is the time when he made the black humor comedy The Story of One Billiard-Room. The only reference I could then find to the movie was from a 100-year retrospective on Chilean cinema that described the movie as follows:

A sports team faces its toughest match: the danger of the degradation and dissolution, to lose the sense of their existence by the transformation of the town in which they live. The arrival of consumerism causes loss of consciousness and competition team that for years has called and given the identity. It is a metaphor both what happened in those years in the Soviet Union, but also to Chile molded in the ’80s.

Having otherwise struck out on learning more, I marked the film as “Wanted,” and moved on to other billiards movies. Luckily, in September 2021, a reader of this blog, Leonardo O, learned about my search and shared that he had gotten an .avi file of the film, without subtitles, from a Russian site two years ago. He then extracted the sound and used a service to generate an automatic transcription in Cyrillic. This allowed Google Translate to generate an automatic translation to English. He shared the file with me, while admitting the English subtitles had mistakes in translation and synchronicity. 

I am so thankful to Leonardo for reaching out and sharing the film. Unfortunately, the auto-translation was too butchered to make much sense, so my understanding of the movie remains only nominally better than the aforementioned description.

That’s too bad, as there’s some unusual imagery in the movie. For starters, the billiards team all wear numbered red jerseys and bicycle helmets. They also congregate around the billiards table, which is – wait for it – round with four pockets along the perimeter and a pocket in the middle.  When a ball falls into the middle pocket, smoke shoots up from the center, and the team’s captain uses a small handheld fishing net to retrieve the ball. 

There’s no actual playing in the movie, though the captain takes the team through some dexterity drills and mathematics practice. It seems he had grand ambitions for how the game could raise the global profile of his village and his athletes, but those plans fall apart as his team is lured to the surrounding material attractions of Coca Cola, music, television, and hot rods. By the end of the movie, the billiards table sits unused beneath a dusty cover, and the team is garbed in punk clothing, lollygagging with local ladies, and acting reckless. From the broken translation:

We together created a new game that demanded wild efforts of energy with self-sacrifice, energy, discipline… my friends and what kind of people, who they are, what they want,  what I personally do not know. But in general it seems that they are not interested in our game at all.