There was Diego and then there was Maradona

Everyone has a memory or a head image connected to Maradona.
Viewers from the cinema where I watched Asif Kapadia's documentary - now available on Netflix Italia - followed and anticipated the D10S dribbles during England's goal of the century, they moved their lips reproducing the hijos de puta in the Italia 90 final and they sighed in front of the photo with the Giuliano brothers, the Camorra clan from Forcella.
The Oscar-winning director for Amy, uses the images of Maradona crystallized in contemporary culture to tell the continuous conflict between Maradona and Diego, the man and his icon for the success and fall of one of the most bulky personalities in contemporary history. Maradona covers the post-war history at a global level - from the Falklands war to Fidel Castro, passing through the rise of cocaine and the television revolution - yet Kapadia has decided to tell only the eight years that the Pide de Oro passes to Naples , a city that becomes the first home and then prison for both Diego and Maradona. In those eight years the distressing oscillation between Diego and Maradona materializes in the extraordinary achievements of the championships and the world championship, in the life of excesses and finally in the beatification of his body. In Naples, it was more Diego than Maradona when he arrived, but when he fled alone in the night inside his Mercedes it seems that the man loved by anyone who knew him personally remained locked up buried under the weight of Maradona.

The documentary - made entirely with repertoire images and interviews in voice over - resembles a psychoanalytic investigation between the ego and a super-ego built to deal with a suffocating and overwhelming reality, where the images represent Maradona and the voice Diego. The result is a very different film compared to the documentaries that have tried to tell Maradona - above all that of Kusturica - but the one that filters the personality of a man who has been swept away by his own public figure is little, a faded memory of a boy who expressed himself with the ball between his feet.