Beautiful game on the silver screen
On the intersections of the big screen and the stadium
‘Cinema lies, sport doesn’t.”
So said filmmaker JeanLuc Godard, ever fond of cryptic philosophising on the reality-bending power of cinema, and of image. Given the ongoing FIFA World Cup 2018 in Russia, Godard’s quote is worth pondering because it seems to go the other way round this time. Sport lies, deceives, tricks, but cinema doesn’t, or image doesn’t, because image, in FIFA’s new ethos, equals truth.
And so, as we’ve witnessed in the past week, a referee occasionally rushes over to the screen installed on the sideline where a questionable move or tackle — was that a penalty? — is played back to him, in different angles, often in slow motion (a much bigger screen then replays the image for the spectators in the stadium, which is in a way a giant open-air cinema). The Video Assistant Referee (VAR), introduced for the first time at the world cup stage this summer, has already decided several penalties, caught tricky fouls and generally eradicated ambiguity and subjectivity from a game once known to be littered by these factors, sometimes decided by them. In this World Cup, VAR is truth, and image is epiphany. Football is thus absolute, because there’s no room for dramatics, for doubt, for injustice.
Is this certainty, this indisputability, a form of beauty, as in “the beautiful game”? It depends: for cinema lovers, while truth is beauty, lies are often more beautiful.
Which brings us to the subject of football movies we might like to revisit this month. A football match runs for 90 minutes, which is also the standard length of most movies, and a match comes with an intermission, much like a film screening of the early days. Besides truth and lies, football and cinema may have more in common than we might imagine at first.
Anyway, I remember watching Victory (John Huston, 1981) on a fuzzy video tape in the early 1980s when a VCR player was a novelty in our community. The Thai title is literal, Teh Laek Laew Haek Khai ( Kick It All The Way And Break From The Camp), which is a succinct plot summary of the film about World War II prisoners led by Michael Caine and Sylvester Stallone who hatch an escape plan during a football match with their German captors. Pele, Bobby Moore and Osvaldo Ardiles also made an appearance, to varying degrees of cinematic memorability. It’s not a classic film in terms of quality, but it’s quite ingenious in the way it concocts a potpourri of war film, escape narrative, football appeal and star cameos in one neat salad bowl.
For entertainment and empowerment, we can always revisit Bend It Like Beckham, Gurinder Chadha’s 2002 film about a Sikh girl in London who defies her Indian parents’ conservatism and joins a football team. It’s one of those films that argues for the virtue of sport as an empowering tool, a level playing field for the marginalised and the overlooked (you can transpose the formula for other sports, such as Dangal for wrestling or The Iron Ladies for volleyball). Parminder Nagra plays the leading woman, but we also remember Bend It Like Beckham as the film that substantially accelerated Keira Knightley’s career.
Still on the issue of women and football but with a vastly different sentiment, check out the Iranian film Offside, a black comedy that will urge us to ponder the truth-vs-lie DNA of cinema. Jafar Panahi’s 2006 film portrays a group of young women in Tehran who sneak into a stadium — women are forbidden from attending sports events in the Islamic Republic — to watch a decisive World Cup qualifying match between Iran and Bahrain. The women are caught by military conscripts deployed to patrol the parameters and put in a van. On the way to the police station, the street of Tehran erupts with jubilant crowds as Iran win the game and qualify. At that instant, football causes delirium and obliterates the law of god and men, sort of, and Panahi’s wry treatment lets documentary, fiction and social history come together in a bittersweet fashion.
Football is treated as drama and comedy, serious and tomfoolery, from the West to the East. Stephen Chow’s Shaolin Soccer
(2001) is a hilarious Hong Kong comedy that mixes monks, martial arts and football. From Thailland, we have the ill-fated Mak Teh ( Lucky Loser, 2006), a comedy about an underdog football team — the film was mired by controversy since the original cut specified the poor, inept team as Laos, prompting protests and an eventual name change. From Malaysia, you have Goalposts & Lipsticks (2005), about a college woman who takes up futsal to win back her boyfriend. A Tibetan film called The Cup (1999) tells the story of Indian refugees who introduce the game to monks at a monastery — football as enlightenment, take that! And of course, the Japanese cartoon Captain Tsubasa formed a good part of many kids’ football upbringing in the 1990s.
The list goes on (Tom Hooper’s The Damned United,
a much better film than his Oscar-winning The King’s Speech; Vinnie Jones-starring Mean Machine; Goal!, a ragto-rich story; Ken Loach’s drama Looking For Eric, as in Cantona; plus tonnes of documentary films on every aspect of the game and favourite teams). But allow me to conclude with my favourite, a football film unlike any other. Douglas Gordon’s Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait is a 2006 nonfiction video art in which Zinedine Zidane, one of the greatest athletes of this generation, is filmed during the course of a single match by 17 cameras placed around the field. The images we see are devoid of context; we don’t see always the ball, we only watch Zidane move, walk, run, sweat, looking bored, waiting for the ball, sometimes we only see his head, his hand, his feet, with a purring soundtrack by Mogwai and Zidane’s voice on random thoughts. Football, and this magnificent footballer, is deconstructed and never reconstructed; he becomes fragments, puzzles, a dissected body, while the game becomes an abstract void, a time that has escaped from another time — like cinema itself.
Watching Zidane, we don’t learn anything more about Zinedine Zidane (we can always read about that by the way). We understand, or we feel, however, that cinema isn’t always a lie and football isn’t always the truth. Football is an enigma, a beautiful enigma, that exists in between.
FIFA won’t agree with that anyway.
SPORT LIES, DECEIVES, TRICKS, BUT CINEMA DOESN’T, OR IMAGE DOESN’T, BECAUSE IMAGE, IN FIFA’S NEW ETHOS, EQUALS TRUTH