Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait
Grizzly Man

Watching these films Shornbare is struck by a number similarities. This is most evident in the music - hauntingly beautiful in both films - which gives a sense of the solitariness of the male protagonists: men who have chosen a world apart. 

The concentration and expressionlessness of Zidane reveal both an animal quality and, paradoxically, an artistic quality. His finely-honed instinct revealed in his movement and his resulting intervention in the football match. The physical nature of football – concentrated, as it is in the film, on one individual - begins to look far less like a game and much more like a struggle to show alpha male status. Tackles take on the appearance of skirmishes in a striving for superiority.

The bears of Grizzly Man have something of the Zidane about them; an almost bored command of their environment. Their aggression exploding in short bursts. Shornbare doesn’t want to over-cook the similarities between Zidane and Grizzly Man Timothy Treadwell (who really is a nutcase), but they are both locked in worlds of their own choosing. Zidane, obviously, can walk off the football pitch and back into normal life. Treadwell, equally obviously, doesn't know what normal life is. There is an art to these men that is gently revealed in both films; a life's patient work hidden behind moments of masterful manipulation.