Diego Maradona
Sports Documentary | 130 Minutes | 2019 | United Kingdom
(3.5/4)
Director: Asif Kapadia | Producers: James Gay-Rees, Paul Martin | Starring: Diego Maradona | Music: Antônio Pinto | Editor: Chris King
The documentary Diego Maradona by Asif Kapadia posits its subject as the embodiment of the eighties. To stabbing synths and propulsive percussion, through grainy footage we follow a motorcade which resembles a car chase as it races and weaves through the city of Naples.
The touchstone is the television series Knight Rider, and one of the successes of Diego Maradona lies in how it manages to restore some of the luxe hedonism and heady momentum to a story so often shrouded by bloated excess. A keenly self-conscious Maradona pushes himself through sporting triumphs and binge cycles, as the barrio boy from Buenos Aires in the slum city of Naples embraces the fur coats and neon lights.
As we follow the grainy motorcade, the montage which opens Kapadia’s film summarises the life of Diego Maradona up to this point: a precocious youth at Argentinos Juniors and Boca Juniors, early comparisons to Pelé, then a big-money move to Barcelona which in spite of the goalscoring heroics was wracked by injury and ended in a mass brawl. Our destination is the Stadio San Paolo and S.S.C. Napoli. The struggling football club from the poorest city in Italy has just spent £6.9 million on the mercurial Argentinian, another world record transfer fee.
Diego Maradona focuses on the seven years the player spent at Napoli, the peak of his career during which the football club scaled scarcely plausible heights. When Maradona joined Napoli in the summer of 1984, no side from the south of Italy had ever won a league title. Napoli had only a couple of domestic cups to their name, while following a period of strength in the seventies the side was back battling relegation to the second tier.
In the face of the fierce regionalism which continues to define cultural and political attitudes in Italy, Naples was considered a choleric backwater. As banners and shouts from the stands made abundantly clear, Neapolitans were regarded as the ‘Africans’ of Italy, the mangy dogs, the impoverished and unwashed. Maradona was short and he was never particularly athletic, but he had broad shoulders. As a teenager his exploits had taken his parents and six siblings out of the slums of Villa Fiorito. With a sense of gregariousness that could turn indignant more than spiteful, the insults only served to drive him. Naples for all of its fraught compromises proved a perfect fit.
Asif Kapadia’s film eschews talking heads for archival footage. Instead Maradona and other key figures offer their recollections by way of voice-overs, briefly illuminating the turbulent score. Much of the footage, drawn from private collections and stalled contemporary projects, has never been seen. Together with news clips and football highlights, Diego Maradona maintains a brisk pace and paints an intimate portrait.
We see him at home and on the tennis court, in the Napoli dressing room, and on tour with Argentina where his father serves as team grillmaster, cooking up linked chorizo and cuts of steak. As Argentina pursue glory at the World Cup in Mexico, Maradona gathers some of his inspirations about him: in his room he carries a picture of his partner Claudia and a niche bearing an icon of the Virgin Mary alongside nude pin-ups and an album cover by the Argentine songstress Valeria Lynch.
Inevitably even the 130-minute runtime and condensed seven-year focus fail to capture the experience of watching Maradona out on the football pitch week-by-week. The story of the man figures as a cultural moment rather than a sporting moment. Ultras and the steady globalisation of the sport serve as a backdrop to personal travails, cocaine habits, and criminal influences. Maradona in Naples proves less an Escape to Victory than an earthier take on Scarface.
Maradona succeeds in leading Argentina to the World Cup in 1986, and when Napoli win the league and cup double the following year, he is enshrined as the second coming in Naples. Diego Maradona suggests that this is when his cocaine habit really took hold, spurred by public scrutiny and a sense of professional stasis, facilitated by the Camorra who loom like a spectre over the city. Unusually thoughtful and self-aware, Maradona is still roiled by an emotional immaturity. A concurrent arc shows his inability to accept that he has fathered a child outside the confines of his long-term relationship.
Diego Maradona transcended the sport of football and fired the imagination like no player before or since because he was so great and so flawed. Allied to a tenacity of spirit, he wore both his greatness and his flaws openly, though in quieter moments or bumped and jostled by the thronging crowd the documentary suggests a deep ambivalence with fame and its consequences.
Instead Kapadia draws a distinction between the private Diego, playful and hardworking, keenly aware of his roots, capable of forgetting himself out on the football pitch, and the public Maradona who could never show weakness. At Napoli his personal trainer Fernando Signorini noticed the difference, saying that he would go to the ends of the earth with Diego, while with Maradona he would not take one step. Maradona understood the discrepancy while exploding it, saying ‘Yes, but if it wasn’t for Maradona, I’d still be in Villa Fiorito’.
[separator type=”thin”]
