Two documentaries at this year’s Cannes Film Festival deal with sporting legends.
In both cases, however, their immense achievements are coupled by way of an equally impressive appetite for self-destruction.
The footballer Diego Maradona provides the subject for an intimate portrait by one of Europe’s most respected directors and twice prizewinner of the Palme d’Or, Emir Kusturica.
In "Tyson", director James Toback uses hours of footage mixing fight sequences with interviews and photographs to prophesy the story of Mike Tyson’s climb from his impoverished New York teens to fame, and then ignomy.
Both have been eagerly anticipated and it’s easy to welcome why. When it comes to committing sporting legends to the silver screen, unified equation seems to hold true — the more controversial the better.
Consequently, documentaries celebrating sporting greats like Michael Jordan or Pele tend to be unremarkable — dealing as they are with men whose incredible talent was matched by a relaxed temperament and a shrewdness that kept them out of trouble.
By contrast, two of the most critically-acclaimed sports documentaries of the last 20 years featured flawed sporting legends: the self-appointed "greatest" Muhammad Ali and the brooding French footballer Zinedine Zidane.
Equally, the lives of Maradona and Tyson make a loan of themselves perfectly to the theatre of cinema. Like characters in a Shakespearean tragedy, both reached the absolute pinnacle of sporting achievement only to be laid low by a farrago of hubris, greed and their own personal demons.
That Tyson and Maradona both seem to have been returned from the brink, rehabilitated and with (at least in Tyson’s case) a degree of servility, gives their stories a redemptive quality worthy of a Christian parable.
"I’ve lived a wild and strange life," Tyson told a info conference at Cannes ahead of this week’s screening.
"I’ve used drugs, I’ve had physical altercations with dangerous people, people were angry. I’ve slept with guys’ wives, they wanted to coup de gr
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