Football series and television viewers have known this at least since Manni, the Libero, have had a real casting problem. At the beginning of 1982, Tommi Ohrner, in the role of the fluffy ZDF national player, didn’t even know exactly with which part of the body you practice this sport.
39 years later, Pietro Castellitto slipped into Francesco Totti’s striker shoes so clumsily that Amazon Prime wisely showed the Roman superstar only hip-up when handling the ball. The portrayal of what is perhaps the greatest of all football legends gave rise to fear of foreign shame.
[„Maradona: Sueño bendito“, Amazon Prime, ab Freitag]
Diego Armando Maradona Franco, as is well known, hand, foot, heart, belly of God – played by amateurs? Not possible! Director Alejandro Aimetta thought, too, and cast the actor in his ten-part biopic not only because of similarity, but also because of his football talent. When we watch the fallen angel of Argentina rise into football heaven from a slum near Buenos Aires and burn his wings so much that he stayed there for all eternity last year, we see an actor who can really kick. It’s a shame that Juan Cruz can only mime the dribble king as a child – at least in terms of football aesthetics.
Four curly heads of different ages
Because in series dramaturgical terms, Diego Maradona is staged by four curly haired heads of different ages. And apart from the visible fact that only the youngest has a feel for the ball, the other three also make it extremely credible: Nicolás Goldschmidt played him as a teenager who made it from football field to superstar. Nazareno Casero as Twentysomething that takes it from superstar to national hero. Juan Palomino as a juvenile old man wrestling with the legacy of his grandeur. In constant change they interpret Maradona’s existence as creatively as possible and as plausibly as necessary in order to erect a fictional monument to him.
An all too human monument that was majestic and profane, divine and earthly, full of poop and radiant at the same time. The actual main actor of “Maradona: Sueño bendito” is therefore the original even in its absence, which is why there was hardly any need for the script drafts by Alejandro Aimetta with Guillermo Salmerón and Silvina Olschansky (“El Marginal”). Your story, as precisely as it describes the melodramatic diva-like quality, probably doesn’t even come close to the person in the limelight.
We owe all the more to the creators for not engaging in any hero cult, but for keeping an eye on the accompanying circumstances – private, but above all political. The secondary main roles at Maradona’s side therefore play neither Diego’s first (Laura Esquivel) and last (Julieta Cardinali) love Claudia nor his fatherly friend (Leonardo Sbaraglia) and later manager (Jean Pierre Noher) Guillermo Coppola; Apart from the career of the title character, the first third of the ten parts deal with Argentina’s military dictatorship, the second with early football capitalism and the third with how it itself destroys those who benefit from it.
As amusing as Amazon is making the poor mega-talent rise to become the first football multimillionaire, the milieu study only becomes relevant because the filth of his origins is permanently reflected in Maradona’s palace windows.
And the junta has demonstrating mothers beaten up
While little Diego is nibbling on fellow players on the dusty ghetto earth, mom washes his jersey in the tin trough. While General Videla asks the middle Diego for an audience, the henchmen of the barbaric dictator beat demonstrating mothers from the famous Plaza de Mayo. And while the great Diego moves from Barcelona to Naples for horrific transfer sums, old Diego is puffy and coked and struggles for bare survival.
If anyone were to just come up with these four lives for an entertaining portrait like this one – it would just seem too bizarre to most to be plausible. “Maradona: Sueño bendito”, however, in ten parts, manages to tell a fictional fairy tale of such bizarre realism that in the end no one knows what is truth or what is poetry. Whereby: Probably not even the big little Diego Armando Maradona knew that himself.
