Playing to the gallery

Film of the Month: Zidane A 21st Century Portrait

Tracking Zinedine Zidane exclusively for the duration of a single football match, Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno's artful film polishes but never penetrates its star's enigma. By Richard T. Kelly.

Back in 1992, football writer Brian Glanville issued Paul Gascoigne with the warning "watch out, there's a poet about". Glanville's words were inspired by the news that Ian Hamilton was penning a book about the tubby Geordie virtuoso, then of FC Lazio and England. This Hamilton duly relates in his subsequent Gazza Italia, one of the shrewdest accounts of a clever man's love of football, and proof that Hamilton wouldn't let highbrow credentials discount him from rhapsodising about a sport more readily hymned in grunts, chants and rude monosyllables. After all, why shouldn't 'the beautiful game' inspire beautiful and thoughtful books? Why not, for that matter, conceptually arty films?

To argue thus these days is to push on an open door, for football-derived cultural production has boomed over the past two decades. And if the aesthetes found long words with which to praise Gascoigne, who followed his finest hour in England's 1990 World Cup by wearing plastic breasts and belly during the post-tournament open-top parade, then what laurels are owed Zinedine Zidane, the Algerian-born Frenchman who owns a full set of the game's highest honours, and whose ruggedly austere, gimlet-eyed grace has enthralled fans both male and female?

Enter a cinematic collaboration between artists Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, in which 17 cameras (film and video) are trained on Zidane for the duration of Real Madrid's fairly important league match with Villareal in April 2005. (The film furnishes no context of this type or any other, but Real were chasing Barcelona for Spain's La Liga title.) Not renowned as the chattiest of men, Zidane had nevertheless met with the directors and endorsed their project.

Gordon is perhaps best known for 24-Hour Psycho, in which he projected Hitchcock's movie at two frames per second: clearly this is an artist intrigued by time-based media, and the degree to which images can be scrutinised more fruitfully outside of the whole. One wouldn't then expect a Gordon 'documentary' to be stuffed with archive footage or talking heads. "We thought we could use ideas from the art world," Gordon told the Guardian of his and Parreno's intentions, "and combine them with popular culture." Currently our pop culture offers few pastimes more commonplace than watching football on big screens. (Indeed, Sky TV's monopolistic coverage of live UK football has for some time given digital viewers the option of focusing on a sole player.) Zidane, though, announces itself within seconds as an artwork - in the graphic design of its titles, and by a zoom into an abstracted extreme close-up of a television screen showing the match. Gradually, Zidane himself is centred on the screen within the screen, albeit as a blurred figure on a green carpet. The score - modal drones and meandering guitars by Mogwai - gets into gear, and then we're off, transported into Gordon's and Parreno's multi-camera footage.

Sportswriter Richard Williams has properly placed Zidane among a football elite of "artists and inventors, men who see space and time and angles where we see only confusion". The frame Gordon and Parreno have placed around Zidane assumes - or perhaps devoutly wishes - that nothing he does can be without interest. Indeed, they generate some terrific images, which at times are arbitrary. (The Bernabeu crowd seen behind a stationary Zidane in mid-shot are kind enough now and then to rise and clap in synchronicity, or bang on bass drums.) There is also a degree of arty frippery - pointless frames-within-frames grabbed from a monitor or viewfinder. But above all there is the ball, and the man.

By design, Gordon and Parreno have not incurred the duty of an enlightened reading of the game or Zidane's contributions, how he arrives at them, why they work or don't work - the sort of thing ex-pro television summarisers get paid for as they doodle over half-time replays with light-pens. (Indeed, posterity will best judge the worth of how Gordon and Parreno choose to pass the half-time interval: namely with an on-this-day-in-history globetrot from Najaf to Jakarta, taking in a few fancy-that quirks about exploding toads and woodpeckers, plus a spot of domestic from Gordon: "My son had a fever this morning.")

What is absorbing, though, is to watch Zidane's own watchfulness, his studious tracking of the ball and the opposition's movements. Longer lenses exaggerate his isolation on the field, but then his admirers have long known him for one who can drift in and out of play, and it is in the nature of the attacking midfielder or 'playmaker' to claim moments of stillness. Come the second half, however, with Real a goal down, Zidane raises his tempo. Flushed, sweat darkening his monkish tonsure and coursing down his nose, he starts to exhibit some of his repertoire: a lightning step-over, a foot on the ball, a dribble to the by-line with multiple feints culminating in a left-foot cross headed home by team-mate Ronaldo. In such splendid moments we feel intimate with Zidane's peerless control, his making and holding of space, the adhesion of ball to feet. The film's wider-angled, fuller-body images undoubtedly offer the best vantage with these sequences, much as they best showcase dancers in movie musicals.

But the film-makers have other things they wish to convey: most evidently, a sense of Zidane's introspection, telegraphed in close-ups where the soundtrack is heavy with his breathing and in the use of subtitles drawn from their dialogues with the player. (During the first half, with Zidane's mild frustration apparent, we even get a gesture towards his point of view.) Some of these musings, to do with time and memory, are the stuff of gallery pamphlets and don't really bear the repeated airings they receive. More diverting are Zidane's thoughts on the hand of fate - a sense of knowing he would score before the ball came to him, of arriving at the stadium certain that the cause was lost, "the script written before the game". (Fans know this feeling, too.)

As the match nears stoppage time, the Mogwai music becomes a mounting drone and we watch Zidane first wince at and then wade into a fracas of players, the spark for which is unknown to us, and off he trots for an early bath. Zidane was famously touchy, sent off 14 times in his career, the short fuse and the inner demon integral plot points in his legend. One speaks in the past tense because the final dismissal came in his last game as a professional, the 2006 World Cup final, after his butting of a snide Italian defender who bad-mouthed his mother and sister. Zidane's backstory - the staunch son of Berber Algerian immigrants, raised on a Marseilles estate, who grew up to glorify his adoptive nation only then to get saddled with the impossible role-model burden of embodying a cancellation of French racial tensions (and, probably, to resent as much) - is surely a clue to his bouts of fury, to this and a good few other sendings-off. But it would be the grist of a different movie. To be fair, as football pundits say, the mystique of Zidane probably deserves a film as elusive and taciturn as Gordon's and Parreno's, one that polishes his enigma rather than penetrates it, now that he has trudged from the pitch and into the pantheon for keeps.

Zidane arrives in cinemas simultaneously with the rediscovery at festivals of an earlier and very similar work, Football As Never Before by the German director Hellmuth Costard, in which eight 16mm cameras track George Best through 90 minutes at Old Trafford in late 1970 as Manchester United beat Coventry 2-0. It's a nothing game, and Best was already bent upon drowning his gifts in white wine. But like Zidane, the film is a time-and-motion study, wherein the audience learns nothing about team formation but rather - through the fabled integrity of long lens and long take - is urged to appreciate individual mastery. Best and Zidane repay our attention, instructing us in what becomes a legend most. By contrast, at odd moments in Zidane the fretful highlighted head of David Beckham - once upon a time vaunted by certain hacks as an 'icon of masculinity' - fleets across the frame and is gone.