Diego Maradona

With regard to the Jeckyll and Hyde structure, the name “Diego / Maradona" would fit better. In the seven-year period of Naples, which made Diego someone, a legend, God and the devil, Kapadia cleverly depicts the fate of attributes of ancient tragedy. There is everything; revolt, reaching the summit and going far beyond it, the Fall of Icarus, destructive love (both personal and love of crowds) and pure hatred (both personal and hatred of crowds), the devil's whispering through Camorra, (un) wishing surroundings, social, sports and political overlaps, paternal problem and everything centred around the distracted mind of an distinctive genius. It doesn't matter if you are interested in football or not. It doesn't matter if you admire or despise Diego, if you consider him a pitiable druggy, cheater and liar or the best football player of all time, a football toyer and a fighter with a passion in his heart. It works mainly on the universal human level of the “tragic fate of the genius". And if you are not indifferent to football, then it applies to you even more. It is admirable how Kapadi managed to fit countless hundreds of hours of material into two hours of footage, maintain a clear structure, storyline, do without talking heads, step up the pace and, last but not least, amaze with the restored shots. And I'm not even talking how Pint's music contribute to the resulting emotions. Yes, we complain about (this applies to Senn too) a certain simplistic straightforwardness in depicting events that largely completely ignore other perspectives (gentleman Robson could tell), but ... But that doesn’t really matter (the same applies to already mentioned Senn) not even a little bit, not at all. (04/13/2020)

Kapadia constructed Senna on a confrontation between the famous race driver and his nemesis Alain Prost, who was the opposite of him in terms of personal character. Maradona is also a film about the clash of two personalities. This time, however, the two personalities are those of a single person. In one of the off-screen comments, coach Fernando Signorini points out the duality of the football legend. He speaks of the incongruity between the shy “mama’s boy” from the slums (Diego) and the monster born of a desire for success (Maradona). According to Signorini, Maradona was originally just a mask that the football player wore in front of journalists, whom he despised. With proliferating scandals (drug dependency, disqualification, love affairs), mask and his real self began to merge. Kapadia seems to have too readily accepted this interpretation. Thanks to the above-mentioned concept, however, the film, with a runtime of more than two hours, is held together by one central motif, which contributes to its dynamics, as it creates tension between Diego and Maradona by alternating between situations revealing different layers of the subject’s personality. ___ As in the case of Senna and Amy, Kapadia further managed to find in the man’s life story universal themes (betrayal, forgiveness, redemption, seeking his place in the world) with which even those who have never played football, taken drugs or made friends with Neapolitan mobsters can identify. ___ I also appreciated how Maradona’s story is set in the broader socio-political and economic context of the time. Argentina’s football victory over England is presented as revenge for the Falklands War. Through Maradona’s cocaine addiction, the film reveals how Naples was plagued by crime syndicates that legitimised their activities with the help of media celebrities. The documentary pays a great deal of attention to the issue of national pride inspired by football and identification with a particular club. When, for example, Maradona played against Italy, he tried to defend his “betrayal” by saying that Naples was not Italy, but rather an outsider state in a country fighting for its place in sun (just as he, a poor boy from the fringes of society, had done). He based that on his awareness of the strong animosity between the Italian north and south. ___ Diego Maradona is fascinating especially due to the way in which Kapadia and his collaborators were able, for the third time, to assemble hundreds and hundreds of hours of archival material into a compact, thematically rich form. Antonia Pinta’s soundtrack, into which the sounds of falls, screams and kicks of the ball are inventively incorporated, also contributes significantly to the flow of the narrative, thanks to which the film offers not only an abundance of information, but also a more bountiful experience than many dramas made primarily for the purpose of stirring emotions. 75% (07/09/2019)

Flawless piece of work, really. Its only weakness is the way it forces to the viewer the interpretation that good guy Diego was a victim of the glory-hungry Maradona and the chaotic Neapolitan society. Otherwise, it’s another example of gripping documentary filmmaking for the masses, which through the core motif of the internal struggle of Maradona’s personalities presents both a credible psychological portrait of a man glorified by fame and the controversial story of a genius footballer whose origins and position were bound to the nature of the hated, crime-ridden city of Naples in an almost terrifying way (and that’s why it skips most of his previous career and his retirement). Football is the core, but Kapadia compares the development of Maradona’s career with various personal, political and social factors, resulting in a valuable and ultimately emotional documentary mostly about Maradona, a man under the influence of his environment and his own uncompromising nature. And although it idealises a little the image of the controversial hell-raiser, the power of the argument and the formal art remain at a very high level, to the point that even someone untouched by football should have no problem to fully relate to this life’s journey. 85% (09/26/2019)

Kapadia likes controversial figures, he talks about the most controversial in a given field and also about people around whom various rumours and myths circulated due to their success or even untimely death, and it doesn’t matter if it is Senna in Formula 1, Amy in the show business, or Diego Maradona in football. Everything is bound together by certain characteristics of their moods, and Kapadia enjoys every shot and detail to convey in a very careful and distinctive way a little bit of objectivity and a little bit of his own point of view. In all cases, these are ultimately positive films about the celebration of legends, but they are also figures who defined their fields, and that's no small thing. (10/17/2019)