It is a very simple idea. Train 17 high def cameras on a single player, in real time, for the duration of a soccer game. The player is Zinedine Zidane, and the game was one he played for Real Madrid in 2004 as his career was coming to an end (but before the 2006 World Cup final that formally ended that career). What you get is the portrait of a single player, largely isolated from his team and the events around him. Even the crowd noise is turned way down and an ethereal Mogwai soundtrack plays over the murmur of the crowd. The cameras never leave Zidane. You don’t see a goal being scored, or a foul committed, unless Zidane is involved, just his face. Occasionally his teammate David Beckham wanders across the frame sporting his flock of seagulls haircut. Roberto Carlos exchanges a smile and a look of relief with Zidane. There are endless shots of his cleats and socks, of the sweat pouring off his face. Only occasionally is a piece of the TV footage of the game inserted to give some context. What you get is a portrait of a craftsman, of all the stuff you never see when you watch a soccer game on TV. It is far more mundane because you are not following the ball; you are watching Zidane following the ball. His economy of movement, at the end of his career, is remarkable. Never a wasted movement, but the ability to spring into action and return to a state of rest the instant the potential of a play is over. There is some pretentious and self-important nonsense (French soccer players seem to be regarded as philosophers, ever since the banalities of Eric Cantona — wonderfully skewered in the “Philosophy Football” t-shirts one can buy), and a strange sequence of world news events that were occurring the same day as the game. But the point is made when you see footage of a car bomb in Najaf, and as you watch a bloody stretcher in the distance, a boy passes the edge of the frame wearing a #5 Zidane jersey.
This is probably only for aficionados, but there is a quiet beauty to watching a craftsman at work. And perhaps fittingly, it ends with Zidane’s volcanic temper leading to a red card near the end of the game. He walks off the field, disbelief on his face, alone.