Maradona's infamous 'Hand of God' goal against England in Mexico City in the 1986 World Cup. Photograph: Daniel Motz/Empics
Appropriately enough, a mini-ruck of shoving film critics preceded the screening of football documentary Maradona, veteran director Emir Kusturica's admiring portrait of the footballer, Diego Maradona.
Nevertheless, all got in OK. Immediately, we were treated to a display of Kusturica's typical modesty and reticence. The first shot is not of Maradona's silky ball skills, but of Kusturica himself playing the guitar. Kusturica has his own band, the No Smoking Orchestra, and has a healthily inflated appreciation of his own cinematic achievements - hence his inability to resist lacing his homage to the man he fondly calls the "Sex Pistol of football" with clips from his own movies and the sounds of his own rattling gipsy rock.
I suppose Kusturica's egotism has met its match in Maradona's; in fact, it's the main link between the pair of them. Kusturica's film, which follows Maradona as he rides the anti-NAFTA "Alba Express" in 2005, allows the footballer to express his not-altogether-coherent political views, and gives the pair a chance for a bit of anti-Nato bonding over swipes at the US presence in the Middle East and the bombing of Belgrade.
It's harder to pin down Kusturica's position. While he's happy to obsessively replay Maradona's 1986 World Cup exploits, and very much behind the sticking-it-to-the-West attitude that Maradona has coasted on ever since, perhaps he can't, or won't, see the irony of plastering every clip of a Maradona goal with the Sex Pistols' God Save the Queen.
Maybe it's his way of pointing out the gaping hole in Maradona's rambling arguments - Diego may complain about Britain's "fascist regime", but Argentina was hardly a shining model of democracy during the Falklands/Malvinas debacle. (Likewise, Kusturica has the crust to name Javier Solana as "responsible" for Nato's attack on Serbia during the 1999 Kosovo war.) Occasionally, Kusturica's unctuous joy in Maradona's every utterance seems almost satirical; but if it is, it's so deeply embedded it's practically invisible.
It is fascinating to see how geopolitical protest has legitimised cheating; Maradona's "prank" of punching the ball in the net made him a hero to everyone outside the western bloc. Nevertheless, he sees wide conspiracies at work. Fifa conspire against him, the Italian league president is a mafiosi, doping bans against him were politically motivated. In comparison to Mike Tyson, the subject of James Toback's film two nights ago, Diego Maradona is a fizzing ball of self-deception, lacking the most rudimentary insights into his own weaknesses.
