Truth is the victim when the cameras start to roll
Afew years ago, I was invited on to a radio show where Tommy Sheridan proposed that a film should be made about the life and times of socialist activist John Maclean.
Tommy argued that Maclean’s life was worth remembering: I suggested that turning the Red Clydesider’s life into a Hollywood biopic was a bad idea – for the same reason.
Tommy wasn’t amused. Perhaps he never caught The Comic Strip’s swipe at Hollywood revisionism, The Strike, where an idealistic screenwriter, played by Alexei Sayle, pens a screenplay about the 1984 miners’ strike, which a big film studio turns into a vehicle for Al Pacino as a barechested Arthur Scargill on a motorbike, and a dewy Meryl Streep as his wife.
More recently, virtually every fact-based best picture Oscar nominee faced accusations of inaccuracy last year.
Crew members came forward to say the real Captain Phillips was no hero; questions arose over whether Ron woodruff, hero of Dallas Buyers Club, really was as bigoted as the movie portrayed him; and the eventual winner, 12 Years A Slave, was subjected to a forensic investigation of the literal truth of Solomon Northup’s story.
I was reminded of this when watching United Passions this weekend. Yes, i t sounds l i ke something you might find in the adult section of a DvD library, but United Passions is far more exotic than that.
It’s a cinematic journey through the history of fifa, made in france for £20million and bankrolled by... fifa.
It screened at the Cannes film festival, in france, Russia and handful of countries last year, and is due to open in the US this month. There are no plans to screen it here, but thanks to french Amazon, I obtained a copy so that you don’t have to.
Almost immediately, it’s obvious why Britain would not fall in love with United Passions. If there’s a villain in the fifa story, it’s not a Bisto-stained Sam Neill as Brazilian chairman Joao Havelange, who leaves his job in this movie after making an oblique request that Sepp Blatter guard the Havelange l egacy, rather than dwell on the possibility that he resigned to avoid being penalised for taking million- dollar kickbacks. And the villain is certainly not Sepp Blatter. To the english-speaking world, the Sepp Blatter story is a bit like The Godfather. To developing countries who have had pitches and other facilities funded by fifa, he’s more like Robin Hood.
In this 100-year slog through fifa history, Tim Roth pops up as Blatter around 1975, working for a Swiss watch brand.
‘I’m taking up football. No more watches,’ he declares, possibly echoing the real Sepp, who still hasn’t explained what he did with the £16,000 gold watch given to him by the Brazilian federation as a fifa official during the last world Cup.
No, the villains here are the British – or rather, the brusque englishmen who keep popping up to sneeringly remind Jules Rimet (Gerard Depardieu), the rest of the world, and fifa that they invented football, actually.
Among all this Anglophobia, you’d never know that england joined fifa in 1905. even Havelange is vaguely glossed as a good guy because he beats a snooty english knight (Martin Jarvis) to the presidency
However no amount of boo-hiss Brits can liven up what is, essentially, a series of rose- tinted council meetings, with background snippets of world Cup games, and all the scandal and corruption i s given a good airbrushing.
when the camera rests on a woman footballer, you wait in vain for Sepp to suggest that female soccer could be improved by tighter shorts, as he did in reality.
Suddenly escape to victory feels as gritty as The Damned United.