From a quenelle salute to
World Cup controversy, the brilliant short-fuse striker comes with baggage, and this film does a fair
Job with some fraught material
A galaxy of major names – including Thierry Henry, Arsène Wenger and Didier Drogba – line up to chip in their two-penn’orth on one of the great footballing enigmas of modern times: Nicolas Anelka, the mercurial boy wonder who burst out of the Parisian banlieues but will probably linger longest in the collective memory for triggering a player strike at the 2010 World Cup and flashing the quenelle salute, widely regarded as an ansemitic gesture, after scoring a goal for West Brom in 2013.
But there’s a bit more to this than your standard sporting hagiography: Anelka comes with a lot of baggage, and this film from French director Franck Nataf does its best to get stuck into some comparatively heavy material. We start at the beginning, when Anelka was a fresh-faced young shaver tearing it up in the local park, before being airlifted into the elite Clairefontaine national youth academy, where Henry was one of his peers.