Documentary Description
An intriguing premise for a full-length feature, the idea behind Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait
is simple. Back in April of 2005, Real Madrid–replete with Zinedine
Zidane, arguably the world’s finest footballer at the time–played
Villareal in the Spanish league. At that game, seventeen cameras were
all trained on Zidane.
The film? At heart, it’s 90 minutes of following the
great man around a football field. Yet it’s fascinating. Really. Save
for the odd subtitled comment, and a not-entirely-comfortable
compilation of the day’s news that’s interspersed at half time, the
focus is purely one man playing a game of football. It’s not a raging
success by any means, and there are moments in Zidane: A 21st Century
Portrait where the interest level significantly drops. Yet when it
works, it really works astoundingly well, and you’d be hard-pushed to
find any other film that does anything even vaguely similar. It’s
backed, it should be noted, with excellent supporting music too.
The 2006 World Cup, of course, gave Zidane’s career
an ending it never really deserved. And while Zidane: A 21st Century
Portrait isn’t a dish that everyone’s going to warm to, those that do
will surely be left reflecting on one of football’s greatest geniuses,
rather than one mad moment in Germany. Turner Prize-winning artist and
filmmaker Douglas Gordon teams up with French artist Philippe Parreno
to create a work glorious in its simplicity.
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