A film about football is quite commonplace. A film about young boys who want to become VIPs in life is also quite banal. But a young boy who wants to become a star in Manchester United is as brilliant as a blue sky and as pure as white snow, and there can only be one out of a great number of candidates. Jimmy Grimble had everything against him. His unmarried mother with short-term man friends was not a comfortable family situation. He was the victim of the bullies at his comprehensive school and one of the bullies was the son of the rich tycoon who was going to invest a lot of money to build a new gym for the school. The girl he likes, more or less, at least he would like to make friends with, is a pugilist and she does not like football. The only man friend of her mother's who likes him and he likes has to get unattached and detached from another liaison before being what he wants to be, the father of this boy as well as the husband of this mother of his. And yet his success will come from a strange spiritual and virtual construction he will build in his own mind about a pair of shoes an old homeless woman gave him one day when he was being chased by the bullies. The shoes of a mythical football player. Jimmy Grimble decided in his head that he is only winning, and brilliantly at that, because of the shoes. And what will happen if the shoes are thrown away by one of the bullies? That's the film, the magic of the film, the magic of football too. And a lesson is given to us at the same time. Jimmy scores three times in the final match of the school cup, the first time by himself, and the other two times by using the bully who likes him so much (Ah! Ah!), once with a pass that leads the bully to score through a wide easy opening, and the other time by using the bully's head as a rebounding wall to score without him doing anything except getting stunned by the ball. Teamwork is fundamental in football because it confuses the opponents, provided it is creative. I guess the bully did not like it after all.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Paris Dauphine & University of Paris I Pantheon-Sorbonne
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Paris Dauphine & University of Paris I Pantheon-Sorbonne