How would you go about making a movie portrait about a football player ? This may be a bigger challenge than one might think. the obvious way would be the chronological life & times of the individual, but this has been done so many times, if not in football, then in every other kind of subject. And what is actually interesting about a football player? His opinions about football, his life besides the playing, his family ...??
Football is basically 22 men running around on a lawn, kicking a slab of leather. Ultimately it is meaningless in the bigger scheme of things and this may be an angle that the directors wanted to take on. Not that they want to label football as ridiculous (though you could well argue that it is) but rather that the game as such is very much about a story being told and the angle from where you see this story unfold and being told to you, is an integral thing for the whole thing to work.
At the beginning of the movie there is a zoom in on the pixelations of the TV screen where most people normally (would) see Zidane perform his act. This points to the idea that we are going to zoom in and pixelate the story the way it will be told here. Basically, the cameras will focus , pan in on, and zoom on Zidane - a pure portrait of him in a literal sense. This way the football "game" aspects is shoved to the side because we basically just see a dude moving around in an erratic manner that really makes no sense - unless you understand he bigger picture - you are not being told at the time.
The idea is interesting but I honestly don't find it strong enough to hold a whole 90 min movie (luckily the timeframe of a football match and a feature film is the same). Real time, no cuts (mostly) of Zidane the football player.
I did do some thinking about it for the first 30 mins or so and it did come across as mildly philosophical in nature. But it did not bring much further enjoyment. It will fall between two chairs - those who are football fans will be annoyed that it does not give the full story they are used to, and those who don't care about football (as your reviewer), this seems merely like a pointless series of closeups of a man running around weirdly.
The soundtrack is by Mogwai and seems somewhat pretentious and out of place in this setting to me. I like the idea of adding a soundtrack but Mogwai don't fit well in my opinion.
