Posts
You'll feel many things about, and for, Diego Maradona during Asif Kapadia's new film about the footballing legend who became both a messiah and a pariah. You'll admire his skills, you'll bristle at his dishonesty, you'll feel charmed by him, and you'll be frustrated by him. Ultimately, you will probably find yourself feeling empathy, or at least sympathy, for him.
But, one thing's for certain. You won't be bored by him. Over a slightly ambitious one hundred and thirty minutes Kapadia tells the tale not of Maradona's entire life (though there are flashes back to his childhood in the ghettos of Buenos Aires and forward to his later, podgier, years) but, instead, the seven year period, between 1984 and 1991, he spent under the volcano (metaphorically and literally) of Vesuvius at Napoli.
In many ways, Kapadia and even Maradona himself suggest, these years act as a condensed version of Diego's life story. Arriving in a whirlwind of camera flashes, chanting crowds, car chases, and chaos and leaving silently by the back door. Totally alone.
In that time he'd changed the fortunes of the club, the fortunes of the city, become a hero, almost a God (his blood is decanted into a bottle and left in a Neapolitan church), before being turned into a villain for having the audacity to captain Argentina to semi-final victory over Italy on home turf, amazingly in Naples, in a World Cup (1990) in which the home team were the favourites.
Being an England fan, I was more concerned with our own penalty defeat to West Germany the following night so I'd not really taken on board the significance of events. Also, Maradona (and it hardly bears repeating) was not very popular here after his handball ('hand of God') goal against England in the previous World Cup four years earlier in Mexico City. Something Maradona claimed was his revenge for Argentine defeat in the Falklands War four years earlier.
England were out and Maradona captained the Argentines to their second ever World Cup victory over West Germany a week later. For the football alone it's a remarkable journey but this isn't a film about football so much as it's one about Diego Maradona. Or Diego and Maradona! The point is made many times, a little too many perhaps, that Diego and Maradona come to be seen as almost two separate people.
Jekyll and Hyde style. Diego is the bright eyed street kid, fond of keepy-uppies, who loves his mum and Maradona is the coke-addled monster who refuses to recognise a child he's fathered during an affair, consorts with the Camorra to an extent that he starts to become their property, and (understandbly) tires of the the paparazzi shoving microphones in his face and asking sometimes probing but often impertinent questions of him wherever he goes.
His story is told in parallel with that of the city of Naples as well as the city's football club, S.S.C.Napoli. When he arrives the city is crumbling, an almost perfect illustration of faded beauty. The peeling yellow paint of the city centre buildings giving way to brutalist monsters like, in fact, the 60,000+ capacity Stadio San Paolo where Napoli play their home games to a sea of fire crackers, screaming fans, and blue shirts and flags.
When Maradona arrives, Napoli have never won Serie A. The club is laughed at, belittled, and loathed by the titans of the Italian league like Juventus and the the two big Milan clubs. The city too, in fact the whole of the mezzogiorno, is traduced in a fashion that makes rivalries between Man Utd and Liverpool and Arsenal and Tottenham look like tickling contests.
The Neapolitans, we hear fans from Florence, Turin, Verona, and Milan, are cholera sufferers who should be washed away by an earthquake and as teams like AC, Inter, and Juve have always had bragging rights it seems Napoli have had to suck it up.
Maradona's initial arrival doesn't change much. We see, in footage so extremely close up that we feel every kick of the ball and every hack at Diego's ankles, Napoli turned over by bigger, northern teams time and time again until, eventually, they start to turn it around and, in an echo of Tom Hooper's The Damned United from ten years back, we see a league table on the srceen and we see Napoli, like Nottingham Forest before them, gradually moving up it.
Maradona is, of course, key. In fact, except for the Naples born centre-back Ciro Ferrara whose testimony is crucial to the narrative of the film, none of the other players get more than a cursory mention. In Maradona's first season at Napoli (84/85) they finish eighth, the next year they're third, and then, in 1987, they go and win the bloody thing for the first time ever.
That Kapadia and his team, backed by Antonio Pinto's moving score, manage to convey the duality of the situation whilst not providing a traditional voice over but instead by carefully stitching together found footage, old TV coverage, and voice overs of those who were there at the time and saw the story happening in front of their eyes is nothing short of masterful.
Like Kapadia's other subjects, Ayrton Senna and Amy Winehouse, Diego Maradona appears a man with a talent so great that it, ultimately, destroyed everything else in his life. But that's not the whole story. As with Senna, and especially Winehouse, Maradona is the fatted calf that everyone wants a piece of. We see him receiving a series of painful injections in his back so he can play when he probably should be resting.
When everyone wants a piece of you it's understandable that a journey into drug induced oblivion should appeal. Maradona, he provides some voice over himself, describes first taking cocaine in Barcelona and feeling like Superman and it's to Kapadia's credit that he never moralises on this.
Kapadia doesn't need to steer the story too much or impose his own narrative. It's powerful enough as it is. Maradona's already done the hard work! Towards the end of the film we see Maradona in tears during a television interview as he talks about his time in a psychiatric hospital. Icarus has flown too close to the sun. His wings have burned. But the view he had while he was up there was one the rest of us can't even begin to imagine.
How fantastic the story was was never in doubt. All Asif Kapadia had to do was tell it with at least some of the passion Maradona expended on football, women, dancing, drugs, cheating, and, most of all, life. Luckily he did just that. Gooooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaalllllllllllllllllllllll!!!!!!!!!!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment