Something to watch tonight: Thursday 21 November
Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (aka Zidane, un portrait du 21e siècle) (Gordon/Parreno, 2006)
The list of great football films is bafflingly short. Most sports movies, in fact, are not much more than workplace dramas dollied up with a sporting context. They don’t take seriously the skill involved and how tiny moments can transform a narrative completely.
In 1970, German director Helmut Costard tried to change that with a film called Fußball wie noch nie in which half a dozen cameras followed one player around a pitch for an entire game. That player was the genius George Best (playing for Manchester United against Coventry City) and it had no soundtrack, no interviews, just a weird little staged interval at half-time.
Best was anonymous in the first half but someone must have reminded him about all the cameras because he turns it on in the second. It’s a mesmerising film that serves to remind the viewer that – even when you are the best footballer in the world – the ball doesn’t just follow you around. There’s plenty of standing around and waiting.
In 2005, the visual artists Douglas Gordon and Philippe Pareno brought the idea up to date with 17 high definition cameras with sophisticated zoom lenses, the Se7en cinematographer Darius Khondji, a soundtrack by Scottish prog-rockers Mogwai and the impenetrable figure of French captain Zinedine Zidane.
That Real Madrid team against Villarreal was an astonishing lineup – Roberto Carlos, Beckham, Luis Figo – but the camera is only interested in Zidane.
Filmed before the notorious 2006 World Cup final in which Zidane’s final act on a professional football field was to headbutt Marco Materazzi and confine France to defeat, you can see some foreshadowing of that brain explosion in Portrait.
Zidane is – like Best – ineffectual in the first half but gets more involved in the second, providing an assist for the Madrid equaliser. He even smiles once. But then he seems to get more and more frustrated – with his teammates, the opposition, the referees, who can tell – and (spoiler alert) the film ends with him getting involved in a fracas and being shown a straight red card.
Zidane remains a mystery but the film is so beautiful it belongs in a gallery.
Nowadays, I can play Fifa as Zidane – or Beckham or Figo – and the fantasy is fun but when I think about Zidane now, it is always going to be this version.
A real Captain of a French football team is the star of the best film of the week that you won’t be able to see again for a while. On April 23 2005, dozens of cameras were gathered in Madrid so that they could follow one man go about his work for a couple of hours. That man was the most inscrutable of Galacticos, Zinedine Zidane, and the resulting film is cinema art in the purest sense – beautiful to watch and listen to, yet at the same time as intellectually stimulating and rigorous as you want it to be. It’s called Zidane: a 21st Century Portrait and a more 21st Century portrait it’s hard to imagine as you end up knowing even less about what makes this fascinating character tick.
Also in that May 2007 Capital Times review: Emilio Estevez’s Bobby, about the assassination of RFK Jr.’s dad; the misguided Spider-Man 3; Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey (my cheap shot – “the most recent entry in the Paramount’s occasional series of un-watchable films about un-listenable music”); Flyboys (aka Cheekbone Squadron) and French comedy The Story of My Life.
Where to watch Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait
Aotearoa & Australia: Streaming on Beamafilm (free with participating libraries or rental)
United Kingdom: Streaming on Prime Video
Rest of the world: Not obviously available online