DIEGO MARADONA - Dir. Asif Kapadia
I’d say it’s rare for a football documentary to open with anything akin car chase, but that’s how Asif Kapadia elects to start his profile of legendary Argentine footballer Diego Maradona. However, it turns out to sit entirely in line with the crazy and breathless story that follows.
It’s an exhilarating opening which elicits comparisons to William Friedkin’s The French Connection and Claude Lelouch’s short film C’etait un rendez-vous but here, thanks to the accompanying 80s inspired soundtrack (Todd Terje’s Delorean Dynamite), transports the audience back to 1984 and Maradona’s arrival in Naples. He has just been signed by local football club Napoli for a then world record fee of £6.9 million and was met at the Stadio San Paulo, Napoli’s home ground, by a fervent hysteria of fans and journalists that would come to typify his eight-year spell at the Italian club.
Employing the similar use of archive footage and off screen voices that worked so well in Senna and Amy, Kapadia (alongside regular editor Chris King) homes in on Maradona’s time at Napoli, identifying it as the period of his life that would define his legacy. In the early 1980s, Maradona’s former agent, Jorge Cyterszpiler, had tasked two cameramen to follow Maradona and document his on and off field life, and it is their footage that provides a lot of the behind the scenes material for the film. We see the public hysteria that followed Maradona everywhere he went, the relative calm of his private life with his children, and the undeniable genius of his footballing talent.
The abundance of match footage from two cameras trained solely on Maradon means that there’s no need to use any inherently un-cinematic near bird’s eye view footage that’s necessary for televising a match. This gives the games an immediacy that is further heightened by atypically amplified sound effects and should prove engaging for even those without so much as a passing interest in football.
As someone who was too young to remember Maradona in his glory days, and whose perception of the player had been tarnished by the enduring legacy of 1986’s ‘Hand of God’ incident, it was intoxicating to watch Maradona at his skillful best. The rhythmic arpeggiated guitar in Antonio Pinto’s pounding score hints at Maradona’s South American heritage and also keeps pace with the story hurriedly unfurling on screen.
Whereas the previous profiles of Ayrton Senna and Amy Winehouse were released under single-name titles, this film is deliberately named Diego Maradona to reflect the two sides of the complicated human being at its centre. Diego is the hard-working boy playing his game to earn money for his mother and father; Maradona is the glamorous alter ego born out of the fame and adulation that accompanied his on-field accomplishments.
As Kapadia draws brings the story to a close, we glimpse footage of an older Maradona having a 5-a-side kickabout with some young players. The joy of watching a man, whose off field troubles had tarnished his reputation, take pleasure in playing the game he loves was at the same time marred by watching the young players almost run rings around a man who, in his prime, could skip past fellow professionals with near illogical ease. Age will catch up to all of us but there was a particular poignancy, which I would not have anticipated prior to watching the film, in seeing how the talent that had defined Maradona had drifted away.
Unlike Senna and Amy, Diego Maradona is still alive to tell his side of his story and while Kapadia interviewed him as part of the filmmaking process, there’s no sense of revisionism here. He is neither Diego nor Maradona. He is Diego Maradona, and the film that bears his name depicts the confounding story of one of the beautiful game’s true icons.
It’s an exhilarating opening which elicits comparisons to William Friedkin’s The French Connection and Claude Lelouch’s short film C’etait un rendez-vous but here, thanks to the accompanying 80s inspired soundtrack (Todd Terje’s Delorean Dynamite), transports the audience back to 1984 and Maradona’s arrival in Naples. He has just been signed by local football club Napoli for a then world record fee of £6.9 million and was met at the Stadio San Paulo, Napoli’s home ground, by a fervent hysteria of fans and journalists that would come to typify his eight-year spell at the Italian club.
Employing the similar use of archive footage and off screen voices that worked so well in Senna and Amy, Kapadia (alongside regular editor Chris King) homes in on Maradona’s time at Napoli, identifying it as the period of his life that would define his legacy. In the early 1980s, Maradona’s former agent, Jorge Cyterszpiler, had tasked two cameramen to follow Maradona and document his on and off field life, and it is their footage that provides a lot of the behind the scenes material for the film. We see the public hysteria that followed Maradona everywhere he went, the relative calm of his private life with his children, and the undeniable genius of his footballing talent.
The abundance of match footage from two cameras trained solely on Maradon means that there’s no need to use any inherently un-cinematic near bird’s eye view footage that’s necessary for televising a match. This gives the games an immediacy that is further heightened by atypically amplified sound effects and should prove engaging for even those without so much as a passing interest in football.
As someone who was too young to remember Maradona in his glory days, and whose perception of the player had been tarnished by the enduring legacy of 1986’s ‘Hand of God’ incident, it was intoxicating to watch Maradona at his skillful best. The rhythmic arpeggiated guitar in Antonio Pinto’s pounding score hints at Maradona’s South American heritage and also keeps pace with the story hurriedly unfurling on screen.
Whereas the previous profiles of Ayrton Senna and Amy Winehouse were released under single-name titles, this film is deliberately named Diego Maradona to reflect the two sides of the complicated human being at its centre. Diego is the hard-working boy playing his game to earn money for his mother and father; Maradona is the glamorous alter ego born out of the fame and adulation that accompanied his on-field accomplishments.
As Kapadia draws brings the story to a close, we glimpse footage of an older Maradona having a 5-a-side kickabout with some young players. The joy of watching a man, whose off field troubles had tarnished his reputation, take pleasure in playing the game he loves was at the same time marred by watching the young players almost run rings around a man who, in his prime, could skip past fellow professionals with near illogical ease. Age will catch up to all of us but there was a particular poignancy, which I would not have anticipated prior to watching the film, in seeing how the talent that had defined Maradona had drifted away.
Unlike Senna and Amy, Diego Maradona is still alive to tell his side of his story and while Kapadia interviewed him as part of the filmmaking process, there’s no sense of revisionism here. He is neither Diego nor Maradona. He is Diego Maradona, and the film that bears his name depicts the confounding story of one of the beautiful game’s true icons.
DIEGO MARADONA was released in UK cinemas on 14th June 2019.
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