Six years ago, when I first started compiling my list of every billiards-themed movie, TV episode, and short film with the goal of reviewing each one, I knew I had a problem when I came across the 1998 Russian movie, Klassik. Unlike many foreign films which are released with English subtitles, this film was entirely in Russian. There was no translation, no cheap dubbing, and I had no bilingual compatriot to paraphrase the movie as I watched. As they say in Russian, I was povezlo.
What’s worse, but no surprise, is that as my list grew, so too did the number of unwatchable movies. For every Io, Chiara e lo scuro that I could locate with subtitles (The Pool Hustlers in Italian), I was thwarted by a copy of Pakners in its native Filipino, or O Jogo Da Vida in Portuguese.
Fortunately, the past decade has experienced numerous improvements in speech-to-text recognition, the interdisciplinary field combining computer science and linguistics. And, these improvements are at our fingertips within YouTube, where 500 hours of video are uploaded every minute and now available in more than 50 languages, from Afrikaans to Zulu. As my technically savvier brother shared with me, the process is as easy as:
- Find the video on YouTube
- Turn on subtitles/closed captions
- Go to Settings, select auto-translate, and select your preferred language.
Voila! (That’s really it?? Yes.) Suddenly, the once inaccessible Klassik, the crown jewel of Russian billiards films, can now be watched. The full movie is available here.
Or so I thought.
Alas, the speech translation leaves much to the imagination, as it seems to be entirely literal, unable to make sense of phrases, colloquialisms, and grammatical variance. What’s worse, the translation does not differentiate among speakers, so a typical conversation (at 03:20) reads like, “Is it worth it? Wait for rich answer. For such grandmothers of all the old goats with my own hands peremushu mind no need to be finish yourself someday.”
As such, my ability to review Klassik was severely hamstrung, and I suspect I followed less than 20% of the movie. The lack of online reviews didn’t help. My best guess is that the film starts with the decision of Savitsky, a regional authority, who backs out of an agreement to financially honor the old guard of Russian billiards. This decision must be punished, so certain Russian mafia set up an elaborate hustle in which Savitsky ends up wagering a large sum of money to compete against Gorsky, a writer, who also happens to be an excellent billiards player. Gorsky get injured, preventing him from competing, so his ally Yura takes his place. There is something going on where the billiards table is illegally wired to allow Gorsky to manipulate the balls remotely, but in the final match, that proves unnecessary, I guess.
Klassik took me three sittings to complete, and that’s only partially attributable to the translation issues. The 101-minute film moved at a glacial pace, culminating in an uninteresting billiards battle that lasted all of 60 seconds. The final scene, in which a member of the Russian billiards old guard steadies his arthritic hand in front of a crowd of onlookers just long enough to make a highly technical three ball trick shot, is far more satisfying.
While the movie proved to be a bust, Klassik is noteworthy for advancing my billiards education by focusing on the billiards variant known as Russian pyramid, a form of pocket billiards played on a modified snooker table with narrower pockets. According to Wikipedia, “All games begin with fifteen numbered white balls racked in a pyramid pack. Players may pocket any object balls on the table regardless of number. The first player to pocket eight or more balls wins the frame. In addition, shots do not have to be called.” The challenge is that the corner pockets are only 3 mm (approx. 3⁄16 in) wider than the diameter of the ball, so tremendous precision is required. In Klassik, I believe they are playing free pyramid rules, in which “any ball may be used as the cue ball. Players can pocket the ball they struck if it hits another ball first, with the goal being to carom the struck ball off of one or more other balls into a pocket.”
So, what movie should I attempt next with speech-to-text translation? Perhaps, Karambolage (German)? Or maybe, El Embustero (Spanish)? Oh, who am I kidding…Walkaway Joe just dropped on Amazon yesterday. Time to see how Jeffrey Dean Morgan does with a pool cue.
