There are some old rock stars who look at their guitar leaning against the wall and choose to pick it up again, having to brush off the dust, having to retune it. They do it amidst the smiles of relatives who imagine a midlife crisis, they do it in the solitude of their rooms, expecting nothing more than those strings, that sound to be rediscovered. It then happens that those old rock stars carve out their own stage, their own space to hear another applause or someone singing one last song with them. There and then they are always smiles but as soon as the sound comes out of the amplifier something happens, the first note sweeps away the dust, eliminates the weight of the years in an instant.
The final seconds of The boy plays welldocufilm on Francesco Flachi available on DAZN, leave us exactly tied to that same temporal suspension. There are no notes or guitars but a purple shirt (that of Signa), a bouncing ball and someone in the stands but – still clinging to the expansion of time and its whims – we discover the weight of certain looks, we end up wondering when it ends to be football stars and go back to being men, boys in a small field of the Isolotto, fathers or sons.
Limit yourself to sports tale of fall and ascentof indestructible resilience that goes beyond the common limits of time (with a return to the field at 46), would be partial on balance: a championship that has gone bad weighs more or the grim look of a disappointed father? Do billions or friendly faces matter more, as a refuge, when everyone seems to turn away? A switch, a rapid automatism, allows us to cross both territories, that of high-level football and its glory or the intimate one of the family, of the pressures that go through everyday life and do not require headlines, the whistles of a stadium, to leave their deep mark.
We therefore realize that we are expecting a particular epic, that of the disturbance of those who are unable to be a prophet at home, and instead find themselves projected elsewhere. We realize this by following the stages of building a career, those articles cut out and jealously preserved in an album, and the stages of its dramatic decline, in that tear – that infinite disqualificationthat shame to live with – that made football a demonwhich suddenly excluded him from the horizon of life (from yours and from that of those who were with you).
We wake up, becoming aware of it, being around the table of a restaurant: in Genoa, together with Dogfish and the Foxes, or with friends of a lifetime, with those who have always been there and have always seen you as Francesco (without the urgency of an important shirt or a number on their shoulders). An awakening that allows you to retrace your steps without filters or fictions the euphoria of that row of full envelopes, of those millions spent cascadingallows you to project the moon of the Gulf of Genoa into a room, as a reminder of better times or as an omen of an end.
Beyond the rhetoric of millions as poison, of excess as the cause of a subsequent thud, we finally discover the sound of that guitar picked up again without worrying about some grin, we can hear that special note that (or so it seems to us) it sounds even louder than the black years.
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