Maradona at Midnight

A Full-Moon Party for a Football God

21.05.08 / Diego Armando Maradona is not unfamiliar with fan worship. In his native Argentina there is a church dedicated to him that claims 100,000 members. In Naples, Italy, where he played football in the mid-1980s until he was banned for failing a drug test, he is fondly remembered as “Mara-dio,” a reverent pun on his name and the Italian word for God.Still, last night Maradona looked genuinely moved (if not exactly humbled) by the pandemonium that greeted his entrance in the Lumière theatre in Cannes. He had shown up with his wife and two daughers to bestow his blessing on the film about him by his friend Emir Kusturica. True, some of those in the audience wearing Argentine football jerseys and chanting "Ole! Ole! Diego! Diego!" were from Wild Bunch, the company that co-produced the film, but the excitement was contagious. So much so that, during the film, the crowd cheered Maradona’s famous (or infamous, depending on your football allegiance) goals against England in the 1986 World Cup as if they hadn't already watched them a million times before.Maradona by Kusturica is an odd meta-documentary, less about Maradona’s life than about Kusturica making a film about Maradona’s life. Kusturica’s ambling, piecemeal storytelling may be just what Maradona’s legend requires. Wild Bunch has been doing a brisk business selling distribution rights throughout the football-crazy world.The film opens with Kusturica playing guitar with his band, The No Smoking Orchestra, and that’s just what the director did at the party that followed the Cannes midnight premiere. Guests began arriving around 2 a.m. at the Villa Babylone, and they danced under the full moon, ate sausage and played a large-scale table-football game featuring life-size humans until well after the sun came up.Of course, you wouldn't expect a celebration involving Diego Maradona to finish at any reasonable hour. At a press conference earlier in the day, Maradona had taken a swipe at Pele, his historic arch-rival, by saying, "Our biggest difference is that while he went to bed at 10 in the evening, I'd be out until 5 in the morning." — R.K.