The screenplay of France-Morocco entrusted to Bernardo Bertolucci

I don’t know if a Bernardo Bertolucci liked the football. Certainly he liked it much less than his friend Pier Paolo Pasolini, who had always practiced football primarily, as a boy in Bologna – “The afternoons I spent playing football on the Prati di Caprara were undoubtedly the most beautiful in my life. I almost get a lump in my throat, if I think about it” –, as a young man in the summer and youth tournaments in Friuli, with the shirt of Sas Casarsa and Sangiovannese; and then, as an intellectual, analyzed and interpreted as a cultural phenomenon: “Football is the last sacred representation of our time”.

It may have been for this reason, to fill that competitive and existential gap that Bertolucci, together with his former mentor – in 1961, Bernardo, barely twenty, had been an assistant on the first film by Pier Paolo, not yet thirty, Accattone, and the The following year, he had made his first feature film, La commare secca, working on a subject and screenplay by Pasolini – one day he agreed to organize a unique football match. It was March 16, 1975, a late winter Sunday, and Bertolucci and Pasolini led the representatives of their film crews which in those days were filming, respectively, in the Bassa Parmigiana, Novecento, and, in a villa near Mantua, Salò, or the 120 days of Sodom. A lawn in the Citadel Park was chosen as the playing field. But Bertolucci rigged the cards in play. And, disguised as stagehands’, sound engineers and electricians’ apprentices, he summoned some youth from Parma AC’s Primavera squad, among whom a young Carlo Ancelotti was already playing a promising game. Dressed in improbable shocking purple uniforms, designed by the costume designer Gitte Magrini, the Novecento defeated the Salò 5-2. Pasolini who, unlike Bertolucci sitting on the bench, played the game with the captain’s armband on his arm, didn’t take it well, as always happened to him when he lost in football, whether it was the National Artists match or a trip with the kids from the Roman suburbs . It wasn’t enough to console him that, after all, it could have been a gift to his friend Bernardo, who was turning thirty-four that day. In short, if that meeting, as some claim, was to serve to reconcile the two friends, whose relations had cooled down considerably in recent years following the harsh criticisms that Pasolini had expressed against Last Tango in Paris, it was a failure.

I don’t know if Bernardo Bertolucci liked the footballbeyond that mocking match in March 1975. I asked myself, however, what would have happened if today we had been able to entrust him with the direction, and perhaps even the screenplay, of the World Cup semifinal between Morocco and France. And if he had drawn on the repertoire of scenes from two of his great masterpieces: Last Tango in Parisindeed, and The tea in the desert. In which of the two scenarios would the decisive match for access to the final between Les Bleues and the Lions of the Atlas be played? In the orange and at the same time leaden Paris of the Bir-Hakeim metro station, under the arches of the bridge over the Seine where, in a memorable sequence of vertical-horizontal shots, Paul (Marlon Brando) and Paul (Marlon Brando) unknowingly meet for the first time Jeanne (Maria Schneider)? Or among the infinite and changing horizons of the Sahara, scrutinized with the pained eyes of the disaffection of Kit (Debra Winger) and Port (John Malkovich)? Would the enveloping, symphonic minimalism of Ryuchi Sakamoto have the upper hand, or the excruciating verticality of Gato Barbieri’s sax solos? Would an aging Olivier Giroud don a tattered camel coat to mesmerize and seduce his opponent in a more claustrophobic penalty area than an apartment on the banks of the Seine? And would the Berber goalkeeper Yassine Bounou have the predatory appearance of Belqassim, the Touaregh chief who makes Kim the latest conquest of his quarrelsome harem or the grotesque and disturbing laughter of the doorkeeper of the apartment building on rue Jules Verne? Would the French dance their last tango under the globes of light of the Salle Wagram or would the Moroccans celebrate by pitching nomadic tents in the desert of the Bastille taken as if it were before the Revolution? What protective sky would save Port from typhoid fever, Paul from his self-defeating going against the trigger pulled by Jeanne and Kit, the wonderful Kit, from being hopelessly lost in a hotel in Tangier. But more importantly who, between Achraf Hakimi and Parisian teammate Kylian Mbappé, would you run faster along the out line, as if there were no limits?

With which instead we inevitably have to deal, as the narrator says at the end of Tea in the desert: “Since we don’t know when we will die, we are led to believe that life is an inexhaustible well. But everything only happens a certain number of times , a minimum number of times. How many times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply part of you that without it you would not even be able to conceive of your life? Maybe another four or five times, maybe not even at all. How many more times will you watch the moon rise? Perhaps twenty. Yet, all seems limitless.”