"We follow genius; wherever it may lead"

by Simon Hattenstone

Douglas Gordon recently made a film about Zinédine Zidane. The entire movie - Zinédine Zidane: a 21st-Century Portrait - focuses on Zizou as he prowls through a football match. There is Zidane the dancer, the casual stroller, the sprinter, the magician, and finally the transgressor, when he is sent off after a fracas. Despite receiving brilliant reviews at Cannes, and despite the fact that it has not yet been released in Britain, the movie is already past its sell-by date.

Like many football fans, I have just made my own Zidane movie. It features seven seconds of footage from Sunday's World Cup final showing the build-up to another sending off and it is currently being screened inside my head - again and again. Often against my will.
Unlike Gordon's movie, mine ignores most of the match. It doesn't even take in Zidane's audacious penalty, the leaping header that almost brought a winner, the myriad passes he sprayed round the park, the shoulder injury that should have seen him off.

It starts with a tweak of the nipples from the Italian defender Marco Materazzi - Zizou smiles enigmatically and walks off with him. They exchange words. Zidane jogs ahead, eager to get on with the match. Ten, 12, 14 steps. He stops, waits for Materazzi, pulls back his head and butts him with all his might in the chest. It is an act of ghastly, if elegant, violence. No matter how many times you see it, it continues to shock.

The footage of Zidane is only part of the film playing in my head - the film within the film, as it were. In the bigger picture I have become a character - examining the footage again and again, desperately trying, and failing, to understand. Gordon's film is arthouse; this is an action thriller. In the end it's a snuff movie, as Zidane destroys himself.

It reminds me of a real film I have seen - Michael Haneke's brilliant Hidden, which also happens to have a post-colonial French-Algerian protagonist at its heart and perceived racism as its subject. More important, it is also about unknowable motives.

In Hidden, Daniel Auteuil plays a middle-class television presenter sent creepy surveillance videos of his house. The audience becomes a participant, watching and rewatching the videos alongside Auteuil, trying to work out whodunnit, and why.

With Zidane, though, there is no such ambiguity about the perpetrator. We saw it with the help of the camera's eye, even if the referee and his assistants didn't. The ambiguity here is motive.

Zizou, player of the tournament, was the coolest man on the pitch - think of the chipped penalty and those lovely, lazy passes. Even when he fell to the ground, his shoulder seemingly ripped from its socket, somehow he recovered and carried on, striving towards his destiny. He dominated the game and it seemed only a matter of time before his superiority would tell. And then the madness - the tweak, the walk, the jog, the stop, the butt. In Hidden there is one scream-aloud act of violence - it is so shocking because it comes without warning, just like Zizou's headbutt.

At least when Eric Cantona karate-kicked a Crystal Palace supporter, we could see a linear progress to madness as he moved towards his target. Going, going, gone. Here, there was nothing. Zidane even sold us a couple of dummies: the smile, the jog away. What made the attack even worse was the stage - the World Cup final - and the stage of the stage - 11 minutes to go till penalties, with Zizou as France's penalty king. He looked set to leave the game as captain of a World Cup-winning team, but left as a crazy. Even the absence of remorse seemed chilling.

What was said? Does it matter? There are numerous theories - including that he was called a "dirty terrorist", which Materazzi has denied. What was Zizou thinking when the red mist descended? Did he think, "I've had this shit all my life and I'm not taking it any more, and I'm going to exact retribution in front of hundreds of millions"? Did he think, "This is for my brothers and sisters in the banlieu"? Did he think, "Ouch! My nipples hurt, you bastard"? Did he think at all?

Perhaps we'll never know what was said or what he was thinking. Perhaps the greatest riddle of all is that in destroying his legacy as a sporting hero, he might have immortalised himself as the man who stood up to bigots, real or imagined, no matter the price.