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 21^st Century Portrait and a more 21^st 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 21^st 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