Marco Risi
Maradona - La Mano de Dios

Premise: Diego Armando Maradona is the greatest soccer player of all time. Some say he only knew how to use one foot. The left. But, like Django Reinhardt, "the guitar with a human voice" (Jean Cocteau), who played the guitar despite the serious handicap of losing the use of the ring and little fingers of his left hand, he was a giant "whose reputation transcended time and borders, imposing himself on subsequent generations beyond jazz, the music that made him popular" (Alain Antonietto, François Billard - "Django - The giant of gypsy jazz"). Similarly, Maradona needed only his left foot to be the greatest of all. And to win. Because Maradona, beyond the considerations of Arrigo Sacchi from Fusignano, the Milan and Italian national soccer team coach sadly known for having declared that "Angelo Colombo - a midfielder for Milan in the late eighties, ed. - won more than Maradona", won a World Cup on his own. And he would have won again. But the first time on his path, he met the Mexican gynecologist Edgardo Enrique Codesal Méndez. The second, the last, he was taken out by Havelange and Blatter, who hoped to have a finished and unmotivated player in the United States, yet found themselves facing a champion and an Argentine team determined to go all the way in the world competition.

But Maradona is not "just" the greatest soccer player of all time. Maradona was an artist. An artist of the ball, certainly. Nevertheless, an artist. With his left foot, he traced trajectories worthy of Brunelleschi. His plays thrilled millions of fans around the world, and his stories, his never banal declarations, his always over-the-top behaviors, his life full of excesses and exaggerations have sparked discussion like no sports figure before and after him. Maradona is a tango played by the Rolling Stones.

Until Saturday, January 2, 2010, when in the evening it aired on a dangerous Bolshevik and pro-communist television network, I had kept my distance. "Maradona - La mano de Dios" is a 2007 film by Marco Risi, already director of "Fortapàsc" and in the distant 1991 the good "Il muro di gomma." Someone who has a largely forgettable and deplorable film history. The film retraces the events of the man and the soccer player Maradona, of which it wants to be a biography and tribute, from childhood in Villa Fiorito (Buenos Aires) to the middle of the last decade. There are Claudia Villafane and Guillermo Coppola, Corrado Ferlaino and Alfio Basile. Dalma and Giannina. The Barcelona years are recounted. Naples. The Mexican World Cup, where Diego won and became "The son of the wind" (Salvatore Biazzo), and the American one in 1994, where he tested positive for doping and was disqualified for the second time. Cocaine addiction.
However. There is no Fidel Castro. Italia '90 is missing, the Italy-Argentina semi-final played in a Naples split in half, the boos of the "hijos de puta" at the Olimpico. The championships and cups won with Napoli are not there. Which are not insignificant.
"Maradona - La mano de Dios" is a dramatic film, full of rhetoric to the core. Not only. As has been tradition in Italian cinema for some years, it is a poorly written and even worse-directed film. Marco Leonardi is Maradona. But he looks like Lavezzi. Pietro Taricone plays the thug, Giovanni Mauriello of the Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare is Engineer Corrado Ferlaino. The one who terrified Ezio Vendrame with his handshakes ("... Ferlaino's right hand. A sort of limp dick."). Maradona is an easy-going and too grown-up scamp from Villa Fiorito. Having become rich and famous, he knows the good life. The women and the fast cars. The drugs. He becomes addicted to cocaine. Loses control of himself and his life is in shambles when, in the end, obese and ill, he finds himself on a hospital bed crying and asking, once more, for help and comfort from his wife Claudia. Marco Risi's Diego Armando Maradona is on his knees. Devoured by drugs and his demons.
Marco Risi understood nothing about Maradona, who is instead a man as rebellious as he is proud. He went alone against everything and everyone. Against the strong powers of the soccer world, and the political world. Even against himself. He always said what he thought, facing the consequences, and he paid the consequences. But every time, he got back up and questioned himself. Marco Risi is the son of the great Dino, the director of "Il sorpasso", but Diego is not Jean-Louis Trintignant driving his car at over a hundred kilometers per hour and going off the road. The real Diego Armando Maradona fell more than once and may never solve his problems, but he never bowed his head. He is a champion. He wants to win, and even at the next World Cup in South Africa, he will be on the front line. Sitting on the bench, he will try to give the prestigious Argentine national soccer team its third World Cup title. And to take some revenge.

P.S. All right. Italian cinema is dead. But you don't joke about certain things. At this point, it's better to keep making films about the thirty-something crisis.