Billed as a thinly fictionalized biography of Ralph Klein the basketball coach, this is a pretty different story that spends most of its time on fictional incidents that are evidently meant to externalize, and lend counterpoint to, the mixed emotions Klein must have felt as his career brought him back to the country the Nazis had driven him out of. You come out of the movie with an appreciation of how sorrow, guilt, and vindictiveness can spur a person on, or hold him back, while refusing to be easily distinguished from one another; but you don't learn a lot about basketball. Like the hero of Riklis' previous movie THE HUMAN RESOURCES MANAGER, the Klein character, also estranged from his wife, goes on a journey through the European countryside-- also accompanied by fine music from Cyril Morin-- and finds that the end of the journey holds bigger answers than he or the audience expected.
