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Naples, seen from above, resembles a brain. A deformed brain, for sure. A brain with some excrescences and a few extra swellings which you stare at closely, focus on, and they transform into buildings and neighborhoods that a second ago you wouldn't have imagined could be built. Naples looks like a brain with the left hemisphere facing the sea and the right hemisphere facing the world with a line separating them in the middle. That line is a straight and dark alley, that alley is Spaccanapoli, and where Spaccanapoli meets Piazzetta Nilo there is a chapel with a kitschy flavor - kitschy at least as much as the word kitsch itself -, with those enameled colors that can only have come out of the '80s. In the center of this chapel, there is a miraculous hair of Maradona under glass. Obviously, no one knows anything about its authenticity, but no one stops the German tourists who, passing by here after photographing the nativity scenes, the alleys, and the hung clothes, snap photos of the chapel. The few English who come to Naples don't come here, but that's for the best... that they don’t come to Naples, I mean.
If I were you, I wouldn't worry about the Mayans. Rather, I'd be worried if they weren't right. It has already happened, or so they say. It is estimated that the moment Maradona scored the second goal against England, a billion people jumped simultaneously without affecting the earth's axial rotation. In that billion people should be counted all Latin Americans, all Africans, almost all Asians, or at least those who stopped bowing for a moment, and all Neapolitans. By a rough guess, they are more than a billion, but I want to be optimistic. Basically, all those people and those populations who have suffered the intrusion, interest, and abuses of a phantomatic North which sometimes, when there's something to eat, pops out first with its head and then with its bird.
Maradona stares at Emir Kusturica and tells him with absolute simplicity: "We went to Turin and we scored six goals... six goals against the lawyer Agnelli's team... it seemed impossible that a team from the South could beat one from the North." Emir Kusturica follows him for two years, he follows him silently like the barber's boy standing straight behind the owner trying to steal the trade's secrets. And Emir Kusturica does well because he is Serbian, not quite geographically South, but still treated like a Southerner, and his shoes needing resoling prove me right. He follows him for two years, as I said, between Maradonian churches and watches of dubious taste. He follows Maradona from the one who weighs a hundred kilos to the dying one, through the one who participates in the march against Bush, accused of being just a war criminal, a pig. He follows noticing that Maradona is nothing but a part contained in every man, that part which dreams of being born a masterpiece, being a genius, which is the same part where a little bit of creativity and anger is stored in everyone and that they share increasingly rarely with their fellow humans.
The footage moves from Buenos Aires to Naples, from Belgrade to Havana while Maradona shows him the tattoos with his daughters' names, the one with Che's face, and the one with Fidel's face. Then Kusturica tells him: "Once Gabriel Garcia Marquez told me that if the Americans don’t make you speak English, it’s because Fidel is there." Maradona looks at him; I don't think he knows who Marquez is, at least it seems so from the look, but he adds that he would give his life for Fidel, that he is the only politician with such balls, that he defended his people, did everything for his people's good and that if he weren’t a footballer he would surely have been a revolutionary. Kusturica, on the other hand, says that if he were a rock band, he would definitely be the Sex Pistols.
The documentary alternates scenes of daily life absolutely normal for Maradona, but completely extraordinary for any being. It alternates his sporting feats with his rustic political thoughts, transforming the ability to play ball into the ability to naively think. After all, football is a language and knowing how to speak means knowing how to think and Maradona doesn't think, but speaks, in a stream of consciousness that combines the foolishness with sophisticated criticism, without censoring either. Rather, leaving them free to meet minutes apart, letting them dance with rhetoric and with the populism of not very bold thoughts, but often necessary ones.
Kusturica loves Maradona and he understood him. He understood Maradona. He plays with images, with sequences, like Maradona played with the ball and with life, moving from the tragic to the comic as is customary in Balkan music. Emir Kusturica floods his film with smells, the smells of the streets he walks, of the people he meets, of the sweat odor of a chubby Maradona who stares into the camera wondering if all this is a tragedy or a fortune.
The loveliest words are gifted by Manu Chao who in a horrible song says that if he were Maradona, he would live exactly like Maradona. I don't know who this Manu Chao is. Once he played at Piazza del Plebiscito and I didn't go. I don’t remember why I didn’t go and now I don't know who he is and what he wants, but in a few words, he summed up everything I've said so far. Goal for him, in honor of the gift of synthesis. Victory granted by default for Kusturica and Diego.
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