It is 1950 and Brazil has the entire ear radio or their eyes to the small screen: it is a matter of national pride. The home defeat at the hands of Uruguay, in the last game of the World Championships in Rio, throwing the country into a state of collective despair and devastating. Through the implementation of practical discussion of the ginga, the expression of a happy and spectacular football, Brazilians bring into question their own identity and their worldview. But not the little I say, 9 years old, played football elf shoeless between Bauru alleys. Struck by the sadness on the face of the father, I say promises that one day will lead Brazil to victory, and twelve years later, in Sweden, will honor that first vote and shall be known by the whole world by the name of Pele.
The history of the relationship between Edson Arantes Do Nascimento and the seventh art is a curious history and its legendary way, passing mainly by its appearance as an actor in some films, the most notable of which is certainly Escape to Victory, with that end in overturned that today’s biopic of Jeff and Michael Zimbalist calls explicitly. The new film sees comparsare still the champion, only for an instant, as protecting deity, sitting in the hotel lobby, at the key moment in which the team of Garrincha, Altafini and the same young Pelé finally finds the right spirit, too long repressed, on the eve of the grand finale.
Zimbalist brothers of the film, however, is the first not to have learned the lesson: instead of relying the fantasy and the sense of the moment, instead of sublimating the craft in a kind of dance and play with the cinema as you would do with a football, choose no middle the classic tale and pietistic, sinking into an aesthetic that we would have said even exceeded by more avowedly mainstream product. In the sequences where I say, boy, he trains secretly with the fruits of the mango tree, in the absence of a balloon and maternal approval, as well as in those where, lost and canceled by the indications of a coach who wants to play at ‘Europe without knowing what it means, to find themselves must cling to the memory of dusty rides through the alleys of the village, the film dies and instead settles a hybrid between the television series and hype pseudoautoriale from range on the big screen.
There is good naive, which is synonymous with sincerity; there is one that instead identifies with the overconfidence; and finally that the unwary. That of Pele belongs to one of the last two categories, a mixture of both. It begins with a big disappointment on the screen and ends with a small disappointment in the room.