Gol Mal, Agantuk, Escape to Victory … Pelé inspired scripts, movies

Amol Palekar famously pretended to not know that pearls could be black in Gol Mal (1979). After the snivelling job-seeking braggard Srivastav, played by Harish Magon, left a potential boss bemused. But only in the ultimate con-movie of two-faced deceptions could the mirthless Utpal Dutt be unimpressed by an applicant gushing about Pelé. Where the 30-35 thousand flocking to watch him in Kolkata could be glibly termed ‘fools’, to land a job. Surely, the economist Lele-loving Palekar knew Pelé and loved him very much.

Though, much like the book-keeping pedant Utpal, maybe Pelé too thought his magic was mundane. For when Pelé got a chance to be in films – he starred in half a dozen movies – he always drew on the garb of a supportive shepherding mentor or teammate, with football as a mere medium.

There was Corporal Luis Fernandes, in Escape to Victory (1981), helping WW2 prisoners of war trying to escape Nazi captors, keep their pledge – to complete a football match. The post-match mêlée, with the pitch invading crowds, would eventually aid the escape with Sly Stallone ‘Hatch’ returning with the French Resistance. But if football was to be played, then there was nobody better than Pelé and his beautiful game that the Germans would buy into for authenticity.

The Ipswich bunch would chip in and Bobby Moore and Osvaldo Ardiles would help make up for the 1-4 half-time score. But no team with Pelé in it, and Stallone too, would leave with a scorecard of a 1-4 defeat – for posterity. Even in a movie where Pelé’s magic would distract in plain sight. When football facilitated freedom.

There was that other movie – where coach Santos, a former Brazilian legend played by Pelé, living out a quiet life in the back-of-beyond sea-coast hamlet, helped a rich American footballer to discover the true thrill of the game. That was the 1986 movie Hotshot, where his first lesson to the troubled player was to mind a flock of chickens “You wanna talk about the past? I don’t wanna talk about the past,” he tells the American who pretended to be poor to fit in with his club, played by Jim Young.

Then in the Portuguese hit, Os Trapalhoes e o Rei do FuteBol (1986), Pelé played a football writer helping his friend & coach with three assistants, trying to turn around a ragtag team. The three assistants, besides being recreational footballers, have varied skills – an aspiring singer, a cook, and a designer-cum-samba composer. The other stars were comedians Renato Aragao and Dede Santana, with Pelé joining in the fun of a hoot of a caper.

Interestingly, in most of his movies, Pelé chooses his given names, Edson or Nascimento, or his club Santos for his characters.

In Os Trombadinhos (1980), which Pelé wrote and composed music for, a successful businessman is exasperated by pickpockets in São Paulo, and dials Pelé, a junior team instructor at Santos, to channel their ingenuity and energy into football. There’s an Amazon review scribbled where the amused watcher says, “It is more intriguing for the fact that Pelé is saying some hilarious things than the story per se, but totally worth it just because of the infamous “-Are you Pelé? – No, I am Jo Soares your b*tch” scene. Worth checking out. ”

Even in his titular role in Pedro Mico (1985), Pelé brought to life the empathetic lens of a Rio rogue who steals jewellery and flees both his gang and the police, and is pursued in the hills. Playwright Antonio Callado was known for his immersive insights into social evils, often explaining the circumstances of renegades. Though the movie didn’t exactly set charts on fire, Pelé was reprising a theatre production that had been a hit a decade ago.

In A Minor Miracle (1985), Pelé does a cameo in a movie with a bunch of orphans being helped by a kind priest to save their orphanage.

The world, of course, worshipped him for his giant strides against Sweden and England and Argentina and the Dutch. But for Pelé, a larger-than-life feature film would invariably be about a hyper localised club or unheralded team learning football to beat the odds. Perhaps he knew more than anyone else that poverty and bullying by Goliathic exceptionalists of Davids was a bigger scourge than defenders targeting his shin pads and tripping him. Hence, the iterations in movie after movie.

Pelé had admitted to stealing sacks of peanuts from freight trains to fund his first team, the Shoeless Ones. And seemed to understand the desperation behind thievery, not casting a judging eye on the wretched blokes.

His politics is often termed ‘problematic’, given his hobnobbing with the autocratic regimes. However, he would play a forro slave, Chico Bondade, in one of his earliest movies, Marcha (1972) – on the cusp of retiring. Marcha was about the abolition struggles of those trapped in slavery, helping many flee to freedom by infiltrating many domineering social strata. It’s in the senzalas (mansions) that Chico fights his big battles to enable freedom, so when the masters return, it is to empty houses ending their torture reigns.

When Chico Bondade leads one march, the military, instructed to crush this resistance, refuses to fire at them. Behind the scenes, the Pelé-headlining movie would also go down in history as the highest sum ever paid to writer Afonso Schmidt, after a lawsuit. The film sank, but Pelé played out his hero turn, and subtly allied with those he sought to support.

Goofier side

Not everything was serious and had a dripping savior complex.

There was a lark of a bit part in Os Estranhos in 1969. Absolutely bizarre soap opera, with time and space leaps sci-fi at its core. Mysterious extraterrestrials arrive from planet Gamma Y12 – this was on the eve of Apollo 11’s moon landing mind you. Not hostile, very friendly (Think Jaadu from Koi Mil Gaya). The ETs make contact with humans, through Pelé.

Odes to his extraordinary extraterritoriality are often real. Ask defenders. After trying in vain to stop Pelé, Italian defender Tarcisio Burgnich once said, “I told myself before the game, he’s made of skin and bones just like everyone else – but I was wrong.”

In the official Pelé: Birth of a Legend (2016), he would do the Hitchcock thing – blink (don’t) and miss (not): playing an old fellow in a suit whose tea is spilled by the Brazil team at their hotel prior to the final.

Perhaps the closest he came to playing himself was in Hotshot (1986); though the disclaimer comes in an early scene: after the American footballer with New York Rockers locates the Brazilian legend and begs him to teach him not just tricks but the ethos of football after being dropped. Pelé makes him rear chickens, saying “I’m out of soccer. You have to be my assistant, no soccer, clear? That’s clear.”

Perhaps the funniest disclaimer came in the official Pelé biopic: “The persons and events in this motion picture are fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons or events is unintentional.” No one knows why.

Yet, Pelé’s popularity on screen was phenomenal. “Wow, man, you’re popular!” Robert Redford is supposed to have told him when the soccer star was mobbed for autographs in New York. On the other hand, Redford was reduced to flipping the pen in two fingers, no one approaching him.

Pelé on screen also popped up in other forms. An episode of ‘Sfide Impossible challenges‘ sought to answer the Pelé–Maradona debate, asking players who played against them: Rivera, Mazzola, Burgnich, Sormani, Valdano, Giordano, Massimo Ranieri, Luciano De Crescenzo and Milly Carlucci.

The famous photographer Paul Trevillion would open his ‘Master of Movement’ exhibition trying to pack 3D printing effects into a Pelé sketch, well before 3D printing was born. José Altafini would accept a hugely unfactual antagonist character scripting in the Pelé biopic, calling him: “A phenomenon kissed by God, more complete than Maradona.”

American forward Edson Buddle’s parents would think through their plans of naming him Pelé calling him Edson instead by saying: “I thought naming him Pelé would be too much pressure. Edson not many people would know.” Tiny mercies.

Another outrageous and outrageously popular bit part for Pelé came in one episode of the telenovela O Clone (2001) – for its leaps of sci-fi faith. Through its vicissitudes, matching only Brazilian ace passing of its midfielders, the TV series riffed off Muslim culture in Brazil and (hold steady) genetic cell cloning. Pelé would pop in to release the song “Em Busca do Penta“, composed by him for the Brazilian Football Team. Ronaldinho also had a guest appearance.

The goofy side of Pelé, and one where he seems to have a lot of fun appeared in a scene in Mike Bassett: England Manager (2001) – that English oddball comedy about an inept coach – Mike, which gets its oxygen from spoofing all of England’s doomed campaigns. Journalist Martin Bashir interviews Pelé on a rooftop in Rio with hills behind. Speaking of faves, Pelé says maybe Korea and Japan (ahead of the first Asian WC). Bashir ventures: ‘What about England? To which comes a pause pregnant with all of Pelé’s goofiness.

He asks – not even innocently, but with an adorable smirk:

‘England qualified?

Bashir earnestly says: “Yes England have qualified’

Pelé simply guffaws: “Hahaha”. The heartiest of chuckles.

One must wonder – to complete the loop – if Utpal Dutt actually didn’t much care for Pelé and football. You suspect he did, but was such a brilliant actor that in Satyajit Ray’s Agantuk (1991), his provincial ‘East Bengal Vs Mohun Bagan – limits of my football interest sounds convincing. The Pelé love in that scene where Rabi Ghosh is teasing and quizzing him about New York and South America, is actually in Ranjan Rakshit’s eyes that glow like bulbs at the mention of Brazil. “Pelé!” he chortles, as if Brazil and Pelé were synonyms. Maybe, they were.