- A film portrait of the famous footballer which tracks his movements throughout the course of an entire game - If this movie had done nothing but follow its point of interest - namely Zidane with no other soundtrack but the sound of the crowd - the audience would have seen, for better or worse, a naked account of the art of football as played by one of it's most accomplished exponents. This would have been fascinating in its own right. Instead the whole thing was ruined by self-conscious attempts to turn this inherently absorbing footage into some sort of art-house object. This meant: pointlessly cutting to blurred footage; mixing footage of different kinds to no particular purpose or effect; 'artilly' shooting screens-within-screens (views of TV monitors etc); one sudden switch to a high-speed walk into the stadium sparked by no reason in particular; contextless subtitling with quotations of unclear attribution; The soundtrack was a piece of 'mood music' of unspeakable banality that seemed to kick in at arbitrary moments and only served to erase the real atmosphere created by the spectators. The half-time 'On this day...' sequence was just wince-inducing.
Zidane is one of those rare sportsmen who has attained the level of artist in his own sphere - and so is worth watching for his grace and deportment and warts and all even by those with only a passing interest in football. A football match is a unique cultural event which has a power to engage people that contemporary artists can only fantasise about. It does not require ennoblement by the trivialising effects of dilettante conceptual-art types. Just like the best art and the best movies, the player's performance speaks for itself and should be allowed to do so. I'd consider buying it on DVD if somebody else could make a 'minimalist' cut available instead of this....MTV cut.