The Referee director Paolo Zucca has made a film about football fuelled by a desire to get revenge against Byron Moreno, the referee who he has despised ever since the South Korea versus Italy match at the 2002 World Cup.
The displeasure is written across his face when I ask him what a referee has ever done to hurt him.
“Moreno, the referee from Ecuador. He did very bad things against my country,” he screams like an Italian footballer who has just missed an open goal. To add salt to the wound, he tells me all this at the Busan Film Festival in South Korea.
“It was very funny, I had a player in the team in the movie called Moreno and everyone was laughing at the screening yesterday. They all knew about Moreno and that he was very bad.”
The first-time filmmaker reels off a list of perceived injustices.
“We had Francesco Totti kicked out for no reason. Do you know how Moreno continued his career? After a couple of years I heard that he was suspended from refereeing in Ecuador because he added an extra 30 minutes of time at the end of a football match, and after this episode he was caught at JFK airport with several kilos of heroin and now he’s in prison in New York. He’s the personification of evil.”
I don’t break it to Zucca that Moreno is now free having served his sentence, nor that it was 13 minutes of added time and that he was suspended for falsifying the times that the goals were scored on the match report. I definitely don’t tell him, especially in the face of such passion, that I was ecstatic about Moreno’s decision-making prowess (or lack of) during that game. But such differences of opinion is what life is about, and gives credence to the Albert Camus quote, which Zucca paraphrases at the start of his movie: “All I know about life, I learnt about football.”
The energy and gumption with which Zucca tells this story has been translated into a truly wonderful black-and-white film, that has two stories that run parallel until, like a bad tackle, they come crashing together. The first is about a top league referee who dreams of taking charge of a European Cup Final. The second is about a village team who dream of winning their tiny Sardinian league. Their star player is a longhaired Argentinian (Maradona lifting Napoli comes to mind) who wants to marry his childhood sweetheart. It’s told with a mix of genres, the referee scenes are operatic with musical numbers, while the village scenes are shot like a Western.
As with all the best football films, it’s not actually about football at all. As with most of the great Italian films, it’s about the relationship between church and state and the corruption of power, all told with a heavy dose of comedy. He says, “Italy is a country where football has a big problem with corruption, and that is one of the reasons I made a film about corruption and morality.”
The man wielding the whistle fascinates the 40-year-old filmmaker; “The referee is a very paradoxical figure. The biggest ambition of a referee is to take charge of a big game and also that nobody talks about him when a game ends. The referee in the film is not a corrupt referee — he gets corrupted against his will. We don’t normally consider that a referee has a career and if they don’t get better and better they get fired. If they don’t jump up a league every two years, they are discarded. It’s the most meritocratic job in the world. They are more ambitious than players.”
artslife@thenational.ae
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