If the job of a documentary is to enlighten, then it seems director Christopher André Marks has labored quite hard to do precisely the opposite with King Otto. A document of the winning 2004 season for the Greek national soccer (or, for those who just balked at that word, football) team, which was poised to lose after years of disappointment, the film digs about as deep into the meaning of that victory for its nation, its players and its fans as the pair of modifying phrases at the beginning of this sentence. Such little genuine history is actually covered over the course of a miniscule 80 minutes (including opening and closing credits) that it quite simply comes across as an evasion of its subject and subject matter.
To be fair, Marks has lain ambitious groundwork with his attempt to capture both the spirit of the team that feared it would lose and the saving grace of the coach hired to steer them in the right direction. To return to the reality of the footage, though, this is clearly not and cannot be the entire story of their winning season, for reasons that are plain when one begins thinking for even a second about how the personalities of its human subjects have been both captured by and edited for the camera. It becomes quite clear that Marks is editing around the truth of its primary human subject, Otto Rehhagel (the German coach asked to lead the Greek team) almost immediately upon reaching the first few instances of character reference from players on his team.
These players speak of his consuming determination to win, of his fierce and stern coaching strategy and style and of his inability to understand a single word of what they say, on account of speaking German and not Greek and of hiring an assistant coach as (for the most part) a translator. The sensation is not one of individuals lying about their experiences with Rehhagel, but there is almost certainly a “positive PR spin” about Marks’s approach to the man as a perceived hero (hence the title) that rubs the wrong way. Even if these team members’ expressed experiences are technically true, we do not get a full sense of what drives Rehhagel’s intensity, nor do we ever find out simpler things, like why a coach from Germany wouldn’t bother, for many years yet, to learn the language spoken by his team.
Everything about Marks’s filmmaking here is devoted to painting a lovely picture of this winning season, offering interviews not only with Rehhagel and his players but also assistant coach Ioannis Topalidis that serve only to reiterate what we have just seen or are currently seeing in the archival footage. Marks even goes all out on inserting footage of Rehhagel (and a few others) looking out at the negative space of nothing in particular with pensiveness and reflection upon the celebrated past.
It’s bunk, it’s false, and it only sort of hints at the truly interesting story here – one about inspired surprise in the face of dragging disappointment, and about national pride within the realm of competitive sport. Marks doesn’t seem interested in any of that, and the result is that King Otto only resonates as the weakest and least useful documentary in recent memory. The film betrays specificity in favor of broad observations and empty spectacle.
Photo courtesy of MPI Media Group
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