So it didn’t come home after all: the St George flags hang limp, the Gareth Southgate tribute waistcoats have been retired to the closet, and the wound-licking will carry on for some time. Still, the World Cup final is upon us, and whether you’re still buzzing in anticipation or in need of some sporting distraction from the match, a football-themed film playlist of sorts seems to be in order.
Beautiful game and gargantuan international way of life it may be, but football hasn’t been especially well served by cinema over the years. (That’s partly because America, the world leader in sports movies, is hazy on what to even call the sport, much less how to play it.) A few obvious standards in the narrow football-film canon have been established: you don’t really need me to remind you about Gurinder Chadha’s still-spry crowdpleaser Bend It Like Beckham (streaming on Amazon Prime, if you’ve somehow never caught its charms), and I’m not going to recommend you watch John Huston’s hoary old wartime kickaround Escape to Victory (Prime, if you must) merely for the sake of thematic continuity, even if it does star Pele.
I would love to refer you to Jafar Panahi’s wonderful, feminist-angled Offside, but alas it’s not available to view online; you can track down a DVD. Same goes for the spectacular real-time, sport-as-ballet documentary Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, which has oddly vanished from a number of streaming outlets recently (though you can cheekily scrounge around YouTube for complete versions, some in better definition than others).
You might not have previously come across The Second Game (streaming on Amazon via their Mubi channel), a wily 2014 one-off by Romanian auteur Corneliu Porumboiu that may be cinema’s purest, sparest ode to the noble communal pleasures of armchair spectatorship. The “film” itself is a snowy, scratchy video recording of a 1988 match between Romania’s two leading football clubs, neither one on top form; the trick is in the revisionist commentary, courtesy of Porumboiu and his father, Adrian – who just so happened to be the match’s referee – as they wryly reflect on the mediocre match itself, the fractious Ceaușescu-era politics behind it, and the shifting effect of time on their perspective.
Over to the BFI Player for a more, well, playful, tribute to the game: British film-maker Thorold Dickinson’s 1939 comic noir The Arsenal Stadium Mystery is little remembered these days, but it has the dizzy, limber charm of middle-drawer Ealing comedy. Tracing a bumbling investigation into a player’s poisoning at Highbury, it’s also essential viewing for devoted Arsenal geeks, working as it does a range of real-life club luminaries from the era into the cheerful skulduggery.
And finally, while we’re close to home, Scottish heart-melter Gregory’s Girl (available to rent on YouTube) may seem on the obvious side, but any excuse to watch Bill Forsyth’s hilarious, tender teen romance is a good one. Following a Cumbernauld lad smitten with the talented new female member of his school footie team, it of course uses the sport merely as a pretext to examine the far more complicated gamesmanship of adolescent courtship. Consider it a gentle tonic after a month of louder, more exhausting field action.
New to streaming & DVD this week
Unsane
(Fox, 15) Unashamed of its grimy B-movie properties, Steven Soderbergh’s latest post-retirement effort is a fevered, iPhone-shot gaslighting thriller that gets Claire Foy out of royal rags to compelling effect.
Jeune Femme
(Curzon Artificial Eye, 15) French director Léonor Serraille’s Cannes-awarded debut is a spikily authentic quarter-life-crisis study, electrified by Laetitia Dosch’s funny, force-of-nature turn in the lead.
That Summer (Dogwoof, E) Acolytes of Grey Gardens lore cannot afford to miss this elegantly melancholic documentary, which fills in some vital establishing detail behind the 1975 Albert and David Maysles classic.
Wonder Wheel
(Warner Bros, 12) Woody Allen on shrill, overblown form, misusing Kate Winslet as a straying Coney Island housewife in a luridly shot, retrograde melodrama.
Woman Is the Future of Man/ Tale of Cinema: Two Films by Hong Sang-soo
(Arrow, 15) The chatty, low-key charms of South Korea’s most prolific auteur are mostly winningly highlighted in this double-feature package from the archives.
The Piano
(Studiocanal, 15) Fresh from its 25th anniversary release in cinemas, a pristine, extras-laden Blu-ray package for Jane Campion’s still-tingly feminist masterwork.
