(Madman)

Runtime: 91 minutes
Genre: sporting documentary/arthouse
Directors: Douglas Gordon and Phillipe Parreno

When the twin towers were brought to earth in New York, works of novelists and musicians were hailed as evidencing impossible prescience: Don De Lillo’s Mao II had its narrator envisage a world defined by “midair explosions and crumbling buildings”, while Ryan Adams had chosen 11 September 2001 to release Gold, the cover of which presented Adams before an inverted American flag, and which opened with his anthemic lament “New York, New York”.

Witnessing the sudden and inexplicable act of brutality that brought towering Italian defender Marco Matterazi crashing to earth and precipitated Zinedine Zidane’s expulsion from the 2006 World Cup, Turner prize winning Scottish artist Douglas Gordon, from his vantage point in Berlin’s Olympic Stadium, must have felt as if he was sitting on a gold-mine. Just as the assault triggered a frenzied search for motive, Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait was being rolled out in the world’s major film festivals.

Turner’s film, co-directed with Philippe Parreno, provides perhaps the most intimate portrait of a sportsman yet set to screen. Taking place in real time – the 91 minutes of Real Madrid’s 2005 match against Villareal – Zidane consists of jumpily spliced images sourced from 17 cameras trained on the movements of its chiseled protagonist. The effect is hypnotic. Every bead of sweat, every indecipherable utterance and every dart of those calculating eyes is captured. Perversely, however, decisive moments in the match, such as the goal Zidane artfully crafts for a teammate, are not replayed, nor the scoreline displayed. While clues as to context may be garnered from the crowd noise and the pumped fists and back slapping of others, Zidane himself remains immutable throughout.

Above all else this is a study in isolation. Zidane’s seeming detachment from his surrounds, his icy solemnity amidst the swirling contest, is mesmerising. There is an eeriness in the way he glides through the maelstrom, his demeanour and his occasional meditations, appearing as subtitles, hinting at a state of solitude that, paradoxically, is only achieved in such a cauldron.

The evocative score, provided by Scottish ensemble Mogwai, fits the mood perfectly: haunting, graceful and somehow menacing. For all its beauty, Zidane is in many ways an uncomfortable and disconcerting film. There’s something voyeuristic about watching one man, when all instincts are to view the game as a whole.

For all his grace, there is something restless, almost volcanic, about Zidane. When, just as he did a year later in Berlin, he erupts in a flurry of violence that sees him sent from the field, the sense is that this is somehow explicable. Not only is this a portent of what we know awaits in Berlin, but, having stalked him for 90 minutes, the viewer feels almost complicit in the act.

Zidane collaborated with the filmmakers, apparently approving of both their vision and their product. His subtitled musings add to the intimacy of the experience. The half-time montage of events occurring elsewhere on the same day, however, is an unnecessary broadening of focus aimed at ramming home the same existential points made more elegantly, and less cryptically, by Zidane himself.

As Zidane exits the stage, a final of his reflections appears as a subtitle: “Sometimes magic is very close to nothing at all”. This succinctly distills the sense of forlorn fatalism that seems to permeate each movement and thought to which the viewer is treated in Zidane. This is a fascinating film that, like the best portraits, asks many more questions than it answers. Magic or close to nothing at all? Both – and that makes it worth seeing.

Rated: 4 out of 5