REVIEWED - ZIDANE: A 21ST CENTURY PORTRAITGIVEN all the pseudo-metaphysical musings that football inspires in slumming academics, we might, perhaps, be tempted to express surprise that it has taken so long for a highbrow art film to properly address the unavoidable pastime.
In fact the exercise taken up here - to follow an iconic player around the pitch for an entire match - was attempted 35 years ago in Hellmuth Costard's Fußball Wie Noch Nie.
That film, which focused on the late George Best, puzzled more than a few punters hoping for a conventional documentary, and Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait will undoubtedly repel equal numbers of contemporary viewers with its austere purposefulness. Stick with it and you should, however, be significantly rewarded.
Successful both as a gorgeous throb of audiovisual ambience and as a study of a professional going about his business, the film is unmistakably the work of men more used to seeing their pieces in galleries than cinemas. Douglas Gordon, a Turner Prize winner, famously presented a version of Hitchcock's Psycho so slowed down that it took 24 hours to view. Philippe Parreno's work is similarly uncompromising.
Yet the new film, which follows Zinédine Zidane, the head-butt-friendly midfielder, with 17 cameras as his Real Madrid take on rivals Villareal, fully justifies its screening in an auditorium. It has a narrative: in the first half the star, markedly underused, strolls casually about nodding purposefully at the odd stray ball; in the second, following a goal by the opposition, he is called upon to use his prestigious skills, before coming to a sticky end just before the credits roll.
The film requires and profits from projection on a full-size screen: Zidane's unexpected smile towards a joking Roberto Carlos takes on the quality of an epic gesture in such an environment. It is enhanced by the employment of a proper sound system: the characteristically ethereal soundtrack by Mogwai bookends passages where noises from the crowd - a barking dog, an oddly voluble clearing of the throat - are cranked up to illustrate the footballer's wandering attention.
None of which is to deny that the film, whose subtitles relate gnomic, almost Cantonaesque, utterances from Zizou, does present longueurs of some considerable duration. Just like watching the average football match, then.
