We Don't Need Two Metaphors

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.

Yes it's good, but only to a point. Asif Kapadia's overlong documentary is ultimately hindered by its challenging structure and the production's relationship with Amy Winehouse's family. The use of interviews heard over home movie and footage and photos from public appearances gives the journey through Amy's early life an impeccable and raw authenticity but there are times, particularly towards the end, when I wanted to see the faces of those talking. We don't just express emotion through the intonations of speech and Kapadia denies us from the facial expression of those involved. A lot of the film is composed of paparazzi photographs and video used in magazines and news programmes that the film partially criticizes for the continued hounding of Amy Winehouse. It just about gets away with this for a while, but the use of footage from Amy's private funeral felt a little hypocritical and frankly uncomfortable. Kapadia and co. initially ha...