Footballers aren’t really footballers, maybe they were or maybe they just dreamed it in some happy day of their existence; in any case they are the last, those without a home or a family, penniless and without hope, with a destiny to put back together after life’s stumbles. The World Cup is not exactly that World Cup, so forget sequins and sequins, but it is something that resembles it, a tailor-made tournament called Homeless World Cup. The protagonist, or rather the protagonist, is an out-of-print character, who in theory gets little or nothing right with the ball but in practice is the heart of the story. Her name is Protasia, actually Sister Protasiaand she is the manager – determined, tough, definitive – of the ramshackle team of homeless South Africans who don’t turn out to be all that ramshackle after all.
The tour company that brings the football show to the stage is made up of many characters who no longer look for the author, because they lost him in their carefree life, the previous one. Among the many – the former drug addict, the shy person, the dreamer, there is also Valeria Golino – Vinny stands out, played by actor Michael Ward, already appreciated in the very tense series Top Boy. He has the outline and pose of a footballer, but he isn’t. In his existential parable we can read in filigree the meaning of a film that finds in the Italian location – it is set in Rome – a true place of the soul. The beautiful gameshot by director Thea Sharrock, is a comedy in perfect British style that mixes lightness and reflection, halfway between a fairy tale and a Ken Loach film, as life itself is, after all.
These are the ingredients of the film broadcast on Netflix. The passwords to enter the atmosphere of the film are easily given: a certain feeling of empathy, solidarity, redemption that warms the hearts of those who play and those who watch them play. Everything works as it should, along a plot full of twists and turns that manages to dribble the rhetoric, discarding to the side with a feint, another narrative, a particularly successful plot where the drama of the protagonists’ daily lives finds consolation in the occasion that life presents to them.
On a side note, it should be remembered that the real Homeless World Cup has existed since 2001 and every year involves dozens and dozens of teams. At the end of our film – let’s not spoil anything – it really turns out that football is the most beautiful game in the world, certainly the most democratic, the one that – despite the fact that we are all a bit dazzled by the plastic reflection of Football 2.0 that is broadcast every day on our screens – preserves not only the gratuitousness of sharing, but also the most intimate secret of the game. Which is to remain – yes – infinite children.
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