Contrary to the conventional wisdom, there are many great films about football. The best of them, the occasionally indistinct black and white telecast of the 1960 European Cup final between Real Madrid and Eintracht Frankfurt, is a straightforward record of a complete match, from the first blast of the referee’s whistle to the last, minus only a few minutes lost to a brief malfunction of the relatively primitive equipment available to the BBC at the time. There are no close-ups, no replays, no slow motion, yet in its absolute purity it remains a kind of sacred document, a permanent reminder of the artistry of which the game is capable, on full display in a match that ended in victory to the Spanish club by seven goals to three in front of 135,000 enthralled spectators packed into Hampden Park, Glasgow.
Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, made by the video artists Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, also captures the span of a single game (and one of the teams involved happens to be Real Madrid), but it attempts to capture that same artistry, and to achieve that purity of gaze, by very different means. This is the age of the superstar, and the aim of Gordon and Parreno was to follow Zinedine Zidane, the great French midfield player, through the entire 90 minutes of a match, in the process telling a more intimate kind of football story.
Their choice of match was incidental; their choice of player was not. Unlike many of his peers, Zidane speaks softly and lives a quiet life. Deeds rather than words made him a symbol of modern multicultural France. During the 1998 World Cup his image appeared on the side of 20-story buildings, but his privacy was never invaded. His wealth is not flaunted, and no off-the-field scandal has diminished or distorted his reputation. This enigmatic figure would appear to be the perfect subject for the kind of visual inquiry proposed by Gordon and Parreno, which involved setting up 17 separate cameras — including a couple of high-definition jobs developed for the US Army, whose use outside America for the first time required clearance from the Pentagon — to follow him throughout the course of a match.
Some footballers might not have understood the directors’ intentions. This one, however, seemed to get the point. When he was a boy, he told them, he had watched Olympique Marseille from the terraces, spending every match with his eyes locked unwaveringly on his personal hero, the Uruguayan forward Enzo Francescoli. With Zidane, there was no possibility that the film would become a vanity project.
Having secured his agreement, and organized their equipment and crew, the filmmakers settled on a perfectly ordinary fixture in the Spanish league on April 23 2005, when the Frenchman and his Madrid teammates entertained Villarreal in the vast Estadio Santiago Bernabeu.
Any conventional film about Zidane would include the astonishing 20-yard volley that won Real the European Cup final on its return to Hampden in 2003, plus the two he scored with his head in the 1998 World Cup final. It would examine, through the use of super-slo-mo, the technical tricks that were particular to him, such as the roulette, in which he deceived a defender by turning his body through 360 degrees, dragging the ball forward with the sole of his boot while in mid-pirouette, facing the way he had come. It would analyze the gift of balance that enabled this heavy-set man to move with such lightness and grace. It would investigate his childhood among North African immigrants in a poor quarter of Marseille; it would catalogue the transfers that took him from Cannes to Bordeaux as a teenager, then to Juventus of Turin and finally to Madrid.
This new film does none of these things. Instead it attempts to persuade us that by dispensing with the priorities of the traditional documentary, it is seeking other, perhaps deeper truths. Having read much about it, however, what struck me was a relative absence of the kind of ascetic rigor I had been led to anticipate. Despite its indifference to the narrative of the actual match, this turns out to be a busy film, fully exploiting the variety offered by the 17 available points of view. Sometimes we see just Zidane’s head, or his torso, or — often — his feet alone, as he jabs the toe of his right boot into the turf, a reflexive gesture like a trumpeter emptying his spit-valve between phrases. We see him from above, and from ground level; close enough to examine every bead of his profuse perspiration and every gobbet of spit, or from a distance, as a member of a corps de ballet in which others (David Beckham, Ronaldo, Roberto Carlos) are occasionally identifiable. His abrupt cries — “He!” “Va!” “Aiee!” — are embedded in and sometimes isolated against a wonderful sound design, featuring an atmospheric score by the Scottish band Mogwai.
