The Greatest Sports Movie Ever Made?
The man standing on the pitch is in his own world. He moves confidently and deliberately, pacing back and forth within his midfield position, waiting for his chance to make a scoring play. He changes directions but never takes his eye off the action, like a cat on the prowl. He’s part of a team, but looks possessed and isolated, as if ready to go it alone if he has to. He’s not acting on instinct. In every moment of the match, he’s calculating, deducing, playing his opponents. His deeply analytical process speaks to his uniquely cerebral approach to playing the game. In the movie we’re watching, we witness him from start to finish in real time, seeing his teammates, opponents or the referees only if they interact directly with him for the duration of the match. Otherwise, this is his world. Those things outside of it - the fans, his critics, the media hype - do not exist.
And all throughout this match, he, striker Zinedine Zidane, widely recognized as the greatest French player of all time and one of the greatest players international football has ever seen, is witnessed in that process nearly every contemplative minute of Douglas Gordon and Phillipe Parreno’s Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2007). The film is not a documentary, nor an essay, nor is it even about this specific “La Liga,” or top flight match between Zidane’s Real Madrid and Villareal. There are no interviews or narrations. What’s at stake for the teams, the story of the match, the consequences for the winners and losers and everything not pertaining to this player as he plays are omitted. The film could better be described as a meditation. Or a physiological study.
Gordon and Parreno film the match as one long close up on their subject, right up until the moment the ever-contentious Zidane is ejected as the result of a brawl. Seventeen synchronized cameras were set up on the field to film Zidane in action. All we’re doing is observing, humbly keeping eye-level with the hypnotic, roving presence of the subject. We get a minimal number of overhead shots, or glimpses of the ethereal atmosphere of the stadium itself. But for the most part, it’s just this player, and the job ahead of him. Gordon and Parreno use extra long lenses and zoom in from a distance, with the shallowest depth of field possible. Zidane is virtually always shown in motion, and has no place to hide from the proceedings. “Portrait,” is the right word to have used for the title of this project.
Then something even more interesting happens. The sounds of the match fade into music - a sometimes dreamy/sometimes brooding mellow rock score by the band, Mogwai. We hear his breathing. Subtitles flash up on screen containing quotes from Zidane in interviews about his cerebral, almost transcendental approach to football. It’s as if his thoughts are subtitled, even though he doesn't speak. He becomes almost mythic: “I knew exactly what was going to happen. I knew I’d score. That was the first and last time that happened to me.” Often, the quotes are self-explanatory and pragmatic in nature, but in the context of this film, they may as well be biblical platitudes.
There are moments of severe consternation. Zidane spits, screams, wipes the sweat from his brow, trots back and forth across the pitch waiting for his moment. We have no reason to doubt his reputation for being the most volatile and temperamental player in the league. There are short breaks in the mental game he’s playing, as when he gets the ball, or stops to chastise an opponent or a referee.
Hallucinatory splotches of color appear in the background behind him, like projections of his frustration and isolation. The film matches Zidane’s projected sense of isolation with its own. Close-ups on single parts of Zidane’s body seem to dissect him. Isolated shots of his hips or feet are blown up on the grainy digital surface of the film, until they look as if Zidane were about to dissolve into the ether, like a character from a pointillist expressionist painting by Seurat. Or a character in an Antonoini film.
This process attempts to take us inside the mind of the player. We can’t know for sure what’s going on in his head, but the camera is there to capture all those physical tics as extensions of his pathology when he plays. Of all the sports films I can think of, there hasn't been one to take on the task of relating the only thing within the world of sports that really matters: what it is to play the game itself. The moment of. Bull Durham has a charm for days. Hoosiers and Field of Dreams have beautifully written scripts. Rocky and The Wrestler are all heart. Slap Shot remains hilarious. The Sandlot reminds us of when we were kids. Billy Bob Thornton is outstanding in Friday Night Lights. White Men Can’t Jump explores racial themes intelligently. Cinderella Man looks gorgeous. 42 is an important story. The Fighter is a character actor’s romp. And yet, none of this accomplishes as much, or is as practical and noble a use of a movie camera as locating the audience as far within the experience of a player during a game as possible. If you want to learn what it is to play a sport, don’t watch the ball. Watch one individual player the whole time.
There’s a lot to learn from this approach by the filmmakers. In making the film this way, we get a shattering contrast to the traditional terrain of sports movies, which prick our emotions with countless mawkish human stories about overcoming long odds or ostensibly flawed men vindicating themselves on the field. When you think about it, only the game itself matters. What happened on the field or the court that day is the only thing that counts. The final score. The highlight plays. Who won. Who lost.
The sports media give us inspirational stories, nonsense about the player’s motivational relatives or their sick children, the scholarship in the athlete’s name, their contributions to local charities, the initials of the dead person sewn onto their jerseys, the jets overhead, the parachuting onto the field, the star player entering the stadium in designer clothes he was contractually obligated to model, the halftime show or the commercials people pretend they like, the corporate recruitment efforts for the military, or anything having to do with what the players do outside the game. Just like anything going on outside of Zidane in this movie, it’s all trivial to a player’s experience on the field.
I’ve been mostly anemic to sports my whole life, following baseball and basketball here in Chicago only sporadically at best. Because I believe the industries and cultures of professional sports are by and large, cesspools (though no less so than the mainstream film industry), I’m suspicious of sports movies or sports related subjects in movies for their reliance on dopey formulas and their inclination to share in this sick parade of bathos. With the proliferation of online betting and fantasy league apps, the players are now essentially gambling tokens anyway. Sports fan cultures are some of the most toxic elements in a given society. Their sense of entitlement, their resentment and jealousy of the players is staggering and embarrassing and frankly, I find it a shame that something meant to bring pleasure and entertainment to our lives is such a source of depression and disappointment, not to mention negligence, injustice, and graft in most elite circles.
So it’s even more surprising that I find the most immersive, transformative and noble sports film I’ve ever seen to be one that features soccer, a sport I have no interest in whatsoever. It’s the one xenophobic thing about me. Despite my obvious appreciation for the abilities of the players, I haven’t been able to get into the game. I can try to get into a good, close game between two evenly matched teams. Just not with soccer. But as a left-brained individual who has to try to intellectualize everything, this kind of sobering nonfiction movie, which goes to great length to avoid any hint of saccharine sentimentality, appeals greatly to me.
Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait relates the entirety of an intense physical trial from a subjective angle. It observes a supreme example of a mind and body working together, competing not against opponents or the clock but themselves, a study in focus that can be applied to any sport or any competitive activity, with the lessons to be gleaned only from the physical expressions.
Zidane’s infamous headbutting of Italy’s Marco Materazzi in his final professional game at the 2006 FIFA World Championship match.
My favorite moment comes two thirds of the way in. Zidane, just twenty regulation minutes away from being red carded, gets himself into position. It’s a few moments before there’s even a cut to an angle informing us that he has the ball. He’s cornered. Then he frees himself from two defenders and fires and then walks away. The crowd roars. But all we see is his expression, which barely changes as he turns around. His teammates approach to congratulate him. He nods his head to acknowledge them and goes on with the job. Then a cut to a clip from a TV feed and we see how amazing the assist he just made really was, sending the ball from the corner of the field across the goal at what looks like a perfect 90 degree angle for his teammate to score. His subsequent anti-reaction is a perfect encapsulation of the particular brand of sportsmanship the movie brilliantly paints for us.
The game isn’t over. It’s not time to celebrate yet.
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