Zidane: A Twenty-First Century Portrait

From the kickoff to the final whistle--a stretch of time which normally defines a game, but here it is something more personal. On April 23, 2005 Zinédine Zidane, arguably the greatest football player in the world, took the field for Real Madrid, but this time he had 17 cameras (supervised by Se7en cinematographer Darius Khondji) trained on him for the length of the game. This ingenious film turns the sport inside out, concentrating on the individual rather than the contest. The sporting spectacle is stripped of the tactical and emotional overlays normally provided by commentary. Instead we concentrate selectively on the sound of boot on ball and mesmerising music of Glaswegian band, Mogwai. Here is a portrait of existential man, profoundly alone in the middle of a crowd. Zidane emerges as a remarkably focussed artist, whose bursts of dazzling skills, like his flashes of temper, seem to arise suddenly from nowhere. As Zidane himself puts it in an intertitle: “Magic is sometimes very close to nothing at all.”

This is, in the end, less a film about a sportsman than about the isolated energies of a man in his workplace. The intensity of concentration required, the physical grace, strength and skill.

Edinburgh International Film Festival