FILM CHALLENGE: 76) Maradona By Kusturica

76) Maradona By Kusturica

Director: Emir Kusturica

Year: 2008

Plot Summary: A documentary on Argentinean soccer star Diego Maradona, regarded by many as the world's greatest modern player.

Can a documentary be bad? After the recent success of films like Man On Wire and The Cove, it would be very easy to think not. Documentaries, after all, have the ability to give you a first hand look into a way of life that fiction could never recreate. Last year's Which Way Home, for example, was a chilling and frightening look into Mexican life and how America, for poor people in that country, is their only hope of having a life. They can also inform you about a true event. While fiction can adjust the facts and skip important details to maintain the flow, pace, etc. documentaries rarely have this issue and, moreover, it's easy to present many different sides of the story in this medium. So films like One Day In September make for phenomenal viewing. Last of all, and the reason I love documentaries so much, is because they can give you an incredible look into a person's true self. Man On Wire, Grizzly Man and Gonzo, for example, are all incredible studies of a certain human being's life.

Therefore, when I recorded Maradona By Kusturica, I expected a brilliant examination into one of football's most adored icons and a look into the game itself and the country he represented. However, all I found here was an answer to my question: Documentaries can be bad.

This film is the single most egotistic and self-involved piece of art I have ever seen. I've criticised David Lynch's Inland Empire before on this blog as being too caught up in the director's own image of being 'weird' and 'artsy', but Emir Kusturica takes it to a new level in this documentary. Aside from needlessly putting his name in the title, for a film about Maradona, the football icon actually appears on the screen less than the director himself. Kusturica has selfishly edited reaction shots of himself into every interview, chose footage of the footballer which include him standing next to him and even opens the movie up with a pointless scene of him and his band which I can't even begin to understand the purpose of. Most of all though, he even has the ignorance to include pieces of footage from his own films in the documentary!

Moreover, instead of actually examining the life of Maradona, he chooses to just film his political ravings. I guess it brings to light his strong political views, but surely a man of his stardom has more about him than that! Also, as a documentary film-maker, it's imperative that you look at two sides of a story. I've never made a documentary in my life but even I know this. The aforementioned Grizzly Man showed footage of people who rightly despised Timothy Treadwell for putting his girlfriend in danger while it also presented interviews with loved ones who sympathised with his troubled mind. Even The Cove, which was very one sided, at least tried to explain the reasoning as to why the Whaling companies slaughter so many dolphins. But, here, Kusturica only interviews two people: Maradona and the priest of a church dedicated to him. Therefore, whichever way you look at this documentary, it lacks insight, it's lazy and it's completely one sided.

Voice-over, furthermore, is something I can suffer in a documentary to give exposition that footage and interviews cannot. However, here, Kusturica uses the voice over to simply voice his own philosophical views and his adoration for Maradona. What especially angered me though was how he recited conversations he and the footballer had. No offence, sir, but if you're going to conduct and interview on a film, it's usually wise to show it.

Even in spite of all these things, it's just a terribly made movie that uses the same footage over and over again, has no sense of pace or flow and is horrendously monotonous seeing as, every ten minutes, the film revisits the same animation sequence of Maradona's goal against England set to the song 'God Save The Queen'

By the end of this monotonous, two dimensional, uninformative, hero-worshipping and unbelievably selfish piece of work, I just wanted to scream at Emir Kusturica: "This is about Maradona! Not about you! Shut up and go away!"

Awful in every possible way.

0/5

By Daniel Sarath with 2 comments