THE MATCH
The Match, by Juan Cabral and Santiago Franco, what football remembers
Forty years after the Argentina-England match in the quarter-final of the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, Juan Cabral and his co-director Santiago Franco, offer a documentary that goes way beyond sport, presenting this outcome as the result of more than two centuries of tensions and conflicts between two nations, against the backdrop of the Falklands War. The Match (El Partido) is presented at Cannes Premiere. An interview.
How did you come to this subject?
Juan Cabral: I remember coming from school. My grandmother Angelica was waiting for me, watching TV. She was watching a football match. I was like, why are you watching this? She said: “No, this is the World Cup, Juan. The World Cup, it’s not football. It’s the best players of each country playing against the best players of another country.” For me, it was like, wow, we can play a game together all across the planet? That’s just amazing. It really was a beautiful idea that we could all play together. There was an expansion of my mind. And then, of course, there was Maradona. Supermen.
For someone unfamiliar with this match, how do you explain why it remains so mythical forty years on?
J.C.: There’s all this weight of history in these 22 people, 11 on each side – and you’re almost not even aware of those forces that are there. You have one of the most inhuman players of all time – Maradona was such an iconic force in his prime. And you have maybe the craziest manager of all time, which is Bilardo. On the other hand, you have the English team – the inventors of football – with Lineker, the top scorer of the World Cup, and Shilton, the guy who played the most matches. And then there was a recent war. It’s just so entangled.
The founding question of the film is: “When does a conflict start? When does it end?” What does that mean concretely?
J.C.: We wanted people to start thinking about the origin. We went 200 years before the match, and we tell the story of both countries. These two nations are so united without knowing it. They invented football, and they probably have the two best players of all time. It’s just so entangled.
The Falklands occupy a particular place in the film. How did you approach that chapter?
Santiago Franco: For the Argentinian players, it was very personal. One of the players, Jorge Burruchaga, was on duty. He didn’t go to the war, but he almost went. Football saved him. But a lot of their colleagues weren’t as lucky. It was a very close subject for them.
J.C.: We shot the Falklands this February. And when we present that footage in the third act, there are no words. No explanation. It’s just a landscape, very alien, very planetary. And then it says: 40 years after the match. And you have this shot that looks like a football pitch, but there are scars in the ground, trenches, like grenades have exploded. That moment of reflection, the absurdity of war, and how you can be OK with another culture, another human being.
Was it difficult to convince the English players to take part?
J.C.: You have to start from zero. Who do you write to? We had Flora, the producer, who lived in the UK, and I lived there for 10 years. We said: we’re not going to be taking the piss out of anyone. There’s going to be a lot of respect and balance. And once we were able to show the players the material, they were like OK, this is going to be good.
S.F.: We shot all the interviews separately, in a neutral location. We didn’t want them to meet before they met. It was a lot of careful choreography.
J.C.: And when they came together – Argentinians and English – they started talking, each one in their own language. I don’t know how much they understood, but there was the language of football. Barnes told us that during the first half, he was just watching Diego. He wasn’t really playing, he was watching.
Is there one archival find that sums up the spirit of the film?
S.F.: It’s not one particular piece of footage, it’s the combination. We worked with 70 different sources. BBC, Getty, FIFA, Azteca TV, personal archives, war footage, Queen. It’s a logistical nightmare.
J.C.: But there’s one image we couldn’t not keep. At half-time, a white dove comes into the stadium and flies into the goal. And it just sits there. It’s so poetic, for what it meant, about these two countries, the war. And Andrés Burgo, who wrote the book the film is based on, saw the finished cut this morning for the first time. There was so much he hadn’t seen, rare footage he wasn’t even aware of.
“ Between the Hand of God, the goal of the century, between the war and the match, a white dove. ”
The film is exactly 91 minutes long. Was that the first decision you made?
J.C.: Yes, even before looking at the footage. 90 minutes and there was an extra minute, so it was a 91-minute match. The film is 91 minutes. We could have made five hours. But we also wanted it to be beautifully shot, to really try to get a 10 out of 10 in respect of the archive, of the players. To portray them as these sculpted gladiators, in beautiful black and white. Something almost cosmic. Like there’s no time. This moment is infinite.
