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The 30th MIFF ended with a film by Emir Kusturica about Diego Maradona
In fact, this film did not need to come up with a more tricky title: “Maradona through the eyes of Kusturica” - short and clear, and in fact it is. For almost two years, director Emir Kusturica met with the legend of world football at every opportunity, recorded these meetings on film, reflected and analyzed. The result is an hour and a half of “special look.” In principle, this kind of experimentation is allowed by many eminent film directors who want to delve deeper into the world of people of related professions that interest them (John McNaughton once documented the creative rushes of the avant-garde artist John Condo, widely known in narrow New York circles; Jim Jarmusch took a break from fictional plots to to film Neil Young’s concert tour in “The Year of the Horse”; Oliver Stone interviewed Fidel Castro in “Comandante”; Eldar Ryazanov did something similar, albeit on television). But in the case of Kusturica, this was especially important: if he had come to the Moscow Film Festival, which had almost become his home, with another film like his last year’s “Testament” (a broken melodrama with dashing villagers, rogue gypsies, cats, geese and appropriate music), he would have It would make sense, regardless of decency, to simply throw it out (as the character of the “Kinopanorama” reprise of a hundred years ago, the actor Voice-over Vnekadrovich Intact performed by Mikhail Derzhavin, complained: “Last year I did NOT star in one hundred and fifty films - they tell me: “Na-do -ate!”).One way or another, Kusturica clearly found a common language with Maradona. According to the director himself, Signor Diego would certainly have found a place in any of his previous films, which is confirmed by fragments from the master’s past creations, from “Do You Remember, Dolly Bell” to “Black Cat, White Cat”. Kusturica compares Maradona either with Girlgamesh (“once a god, always a god”), or with a minor Mexican - an invariable character in the westerns of Sam Peckinpah or Sergio Leone (the latter is also remembered in one of the first scenes of the film, when Kusturica plays the title tune on the guitar Ennio Morricone from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly finally calls Maradona "the Sex Pistols of football." This last statement is supported by the fact that the chronicle of Maradona's goals (including the "goal of the century" scored with his hand in the Argentina-England match at the 1986 World Cup) is accompanied by Johnny Rotter's off-screen cry: God Save the Queen! - everything would have been fine if this montage had not been repeated at least half a dozen times in what was already not the longest film in the world. We have already understood everything, and understood it more than once, but the director still continues to pursue his own, admittedly not the most original, line. From the same opera - completely mediocre, in the spirit of the worst video clips of the Leningrad group, cartoon inserts in which Maradona has to beat Margaret Thatcher, George Bush and other characters of a similar sort on a collage-drawn field. This is despite the fact that in the film there are actually touching pieces (like how Maradona sings a song about himself at some family celebration, in which he explains the reasons for his ups and the misfortune of his fall), and some... These are, in principle, extremely touching moments that usually remain behind the scenes. A separate topic is video recordings of the rituals of the Church of Maradona, in which Diego’s fanatical fans receive communion with gifts descended to them from the “hand of God” - the very one with the help of which perhaps the most famous goal in the history of world football was scored, get married and pray. .. but this all remains nothing more than a curiosity. In general, if you try to imagine this film in the image of a living person, then before your mind’s eye you will see a tall fellow, not without intellectual ambitions, who adores football, Kusturica’s films at an evening screening at the Cinema Center, dressed in a red T-shirt with the face of Che Guevara set on edge. A laugher who sympathizes with anti-globalists, who loves gypsy and Balkan tunes performed by domestic imitators, who imagines himself to be a simple and reliable guy. In principle, dealing with this kind of character is quite easy. But to withstand his company for more than an hour and a half while the film is running is unbearable.