United Passions Pt 5–27:04-47:09
I have considered for a number of days how to open this part of the odyssey. I even went as far as to write a full on script for the siege of FIFA when they all got arrested at the headquarters and instead of them all walking away, Jason Bourne gradually kills them all off with a Toffee Hammer one by one. Nicolas Leoz — BOOM. Dead. Eugenio Figueredo. Splat. Chuck Blazer — you look like Santa Claus ate Terry Waite — time to Treadstone the fuck out of your eye sockets — bash.
But I lost it all as my laptop no longer survives without a charger. And I’m not writing it all again. It will forever be my great lost tome.
Alas….we continue.
Depardieu has just finished eye fucking the trophy alone in his bedroom after smothering it with mayonnaise and putting on an oversized napkin (this may not be true) and we cut to the stadium being constructed. Depardieu and Mr Ooroo-Gway are walking through the stadium and the music almost has echoes of Home Alone 2 as what seems like snow seems to fall from the sky and the camera pans upwards as they look up at it. Its Fucking July.
We then get some archive footage and newspapers flashing with headlines of results and some black and white footage of Depardieu handing over the trophy to the Uruguay captain and boom….that’s world cup 1930 over and done with. Finito. 25 seconds at most and the first world cup is a footnote. I would have actually liked a little story around all this, maybe Depardieu gets himself into a humorous misunderstanding at a BBQ, Mr Ooroo-Gway gets a couple of call girls into his room and chases them round like Kenny Everett. Or maybe even some fucking football rather than Admin Simulator 2017.
We’re then back to the pitch from the very start of the film and kids are running about on a dirt pitch. There’s some decent stuff on display here in patches, although the cuts for the action are absolutely brutal. A kid at the back post clearly overruns a cross, but somehow is in the right position to fire it home first time. a dribbling central midfielder skips through with step overs and the camera cuts to the ball on his other foot. And then we are back to Depardieu in 1931. This is the kind of scripting that Terrence Malick would look at and think was too fucking obtuse. WHY DID WE CUT BACK?!
Anyway, Gerard walks into an empty room except for Mr Holland sitting in the middle of it in a chair surrounded by Iron Mountain boxes like he’s about to be grittily beaten to reveal where the nuclear codes are. “We Lost Everything” he croaks. At this stage, I don’t know what the fuck they can have lost, but they cut to a bridge where they trudge across and it reveals that the Great depression has wiped out their assets? Again this isn’t hugely clear. Then it turns out that Mr Holland has been using FIFA funds to gamble on the stock market and lost it all — but not to worry because we now get a newspaper seller shouting “Muossolini — Italy is a force to be reckoned with”. I have no idea why this was included. Not one.
Anyway, Mr Holland tries to quit but Gerard tells him he’s not allowed. But he walks away anyway after hugging him on the bridge and telling him to kiss his daughter goodbye from him — at which point we get a lone Gerard left on the bridge in the fading sunlight. Look, I get it. It’s meant to be an emotional scene. I’m sure the director had grand ideas that this would be his Palm D’Or submission scene. But the acting is so wooden it could be turned into garden furniture and Depardieu has the emotional range of a stunted humunculous. Its awful. I cannot state how awful this film is and this scene encaptulates everything that is wrong with what I’ve seen so far.
We cut to 1936 and the German representative of FIFA saying that they aren’t going to war. This accent comes to you by way of Conor Mullen from Dublin and he does a manful job of producing what is simultaneously a humorous parody of a German accent, and the second best one so far. Gerard gives a response to him that slips out like he’s just finished his 4th bottle of wine and then they continue on about the war. This is absolutely unnecessary as a scene and they then drop into a debate about Hitler not shaking Jesse Owens hand. FIFA clearly wanted to use this scene to show that Hitler was a bit racist, and the Italian representative then pipes up as well and they start barking on about Muossolini. Given FIFA’s record on racism, if we fast forwarded to now I can fully see them giving Italy and Germany £2,500 suspended fines for this kind of behaviour. We do get a chance to see an Italian being incredibly Italian though, and he immediately jumps into the running for worst actor in the film with this beautiful piece of acting. Before the scene turns into a completely dick-swinging argument a woman pipes up and tells them to shut the fuck up. Which is nice.
She then shows herself to be the one sane person in the room, even if her dialogue was written by the windows paperclip popping up with “It looks like you are trying to write an emotional speech drawing parallels between war and sportsmanship, would you like us to churn out some drivel?”. She then exits the room and walks outside to be chased by Gerard, at which point I realised that this is his daughter again. Part of the issue I have with her is that her accent is straight English ‘plummy as an apple on the lawn of a country manor’. It really jars when you put it all together. He then gives her some bollocks about resigning and she tells him he never gives up — at which point I vomited for around 40 minutes until my face looked like what presumably Gerard’s scrotum looks like.
1942 — FIFA headquarters in Zurich. A game has taken place but there is nothing written in the papers about it as Stalingrad is going on. They start to talk about it and we get this absolutely stunning script again:
“There was nothing friendly about this game. It was like some mythical match, as if God himself at laced up his boots”
As they go into the game it turns out the Ukranians were playing under threat of death from the Third Reich and again — I appreciate there are historical importances here — but why the fuck is this part of the story? We get nearly 2 minutes of this story and it turns out the Ukranians ripped the piss out of the Germans and were then killed. And we see all of this through the eyes of 3 FIFA aristocrats in a mahogany lined office in Zurich. This film is so full of itself it would be arrested for incest.
The actual story of the match is here and it is well worth reading up on as it is fascinating. But excuse me if I don’t want to listen to it being told through the prism of Sepp Blatter’s grey matter. Its a shit scene in a shit film exploiting a generally horrific historical event. Fuck off and die makers of this scene/film/cinematic universe.
Gerard hops into a car and into a darkened house, where he starts looking at pictures and shaking his head and then sits by a window looking up at a crucifix illuminated by streetlight whilst it rains. Someone like Jonathan Pryce could maybe pull this scene off and make you buy it. Gerard makes you wonder why a fucking vegetable stuffed full of turds has broken into a house and eaten the furniture.
And then its Brazil — 1950! The war is over and Gerard stolls in making a witty remark at our Italian delegate. This definitely doesn't jar as a scene whatsoever. The Italian — played by Pippo Delbono — is fucking tremendously awful again, and in spite of actually being Italian does an accent somewhere between the waiter serving Mr Creosote and Joe Dolce. He’s also fucking unintelligible.
Anyway, Joe Pasta and Gerard get introduced to Mr Brown, Mr Pickle and Mr Jackson — delegates from “His Majesty’s football association”. Brown, Pickle and Jackson sounds like the worst estate agent in the world, and they then get some light hearted ribbing about losing to the USA. Gerard and Joe Pasta act like real dicks here. But the english are dicks too. Its a room full of dicks. And they should all just fuck off.
We then see some more of where the 50p FIFA spend on visual effects was spent as we cut to 200000 people in the Maracana, which looks like a videogame from the 90s on a Gameboy. But this pales in comparison to Joe Pasta saying the word Wembley. I actually felt the entire country of Italy get kicked in the bollocks as he said it. It’s one of the most extraordinary pronunciations I’ve ever heard. The visuals here are absolutely fucking dreadful, the players entering the pitch and the surrounding areas to where the actors are ‘acting’ look about as real as Wayne Rooney’s hairline. And then we get some lovely non-cliched shots of people tuning into radios around the world to tune in.
One face is looking round at Rimet, and his daughter tells him its Joao Havelange, a former swimmer now involved in Brazilian football admin who has more than a hint of Gaspard Ulliel playing Hannibal Lecter in the fucking awful ‘Hannibal Rising’. With any luck he’ll turn out to be a ‘Seven’ style killer in the FIFA headquarters and take a blowtorch to all of them. After a passionate anthems scene for the Brazilians (with more cutaways to barbers, bars, and families standing hands on chest) we actually get some football! And for a World cup Final with 200,000 people, we get the same level of crowd noise I would get if I decided to do handstands at 3am in the middle of the countryside. There is no crowd noise AT ALL until Brazil score to go 1–0 up and we get the whole ‘Brazil are already champions’ stuff from the commentator.
Then Uruguay win. Which is fun.Gerard has already made his move to go and present the trophy and walks through the bowels of the stadium with the trophy as the final whistle goes and he sees a white light eminating from the tunnel. We get shades and shadows of him walking forwards as if he is having a heart attack, only for a monologue to reveal that this is the death of football in Brazil and nothing to do with him dying. He hands the trophy over — gobsmacked as fans stream out the stadium and we get an artful shot of him staring up at the very CGI stands. We move to Annette on the voiceover and PLOT TWIST — we very quickly find out is at his funeral in 1956. The script for this is paced about as well as a fucking one legged man on ketamine doing a riverdance.
Finally, he’s fucking dead. And with that, we no longer have to look at the fried potato and mushroom face of Gerard Depardieu.
