Monday, September 25, 2006

ZIDANE – a 21st CENTURY PORTRAIT - the clue is in the title

ZIDANE – a 21st CENTURY PORTRAIT is an odd sort of film. It’s basically like watching the full 90 minutes of a league football match on Sky Sports but using the Player Cam to focus only on Zidane. At the same time, you get the odd existential muttering from Zidane on audio, plus a cool-as-Professor-007 soundtrack by Mogwai. I have to say that I am a great fan of Zidane – to my uneducated eye, he is one of the greatest footballers ever to have graced the pitch. The question is whether this larger than life player-cam gives us any new insight to his greatness. I am doubtful. In the light of the World Cup final, I would have loved to see a documentary focusing on Zidane’s life in football and exploring how he felt about all the prejudice he has had to deal with. But this is not that film. It is, after all, an art installation, as the title suggests, rather than a conventional documentary. And, I suspect that it is far better suited to an art gallery that to a commercial movie theatre.

ZIDANE – a 21st showed at Cannes 2006 and has since been on release in France, the UAE and Japan. It opens in the UK on Friday.

5 comments:

  1. Ah Mogwai: surely the only band who could appear in this soundtrack and also the one for Miami Vice!

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  2. Trust Ali D to pick up on the music reference.

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  3. Mark Kermode totally trashed this. If it's anything like he described it I'm not surprised.

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  4. But Commode hates football so he was hardly going to like it even if was good. Problem is they picked a match where ZZ does bugger all as opposed to, say, being genius at both soccer and violence.

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  5. Kermode did mention his hatred of football lol

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