Review of Federico Chiesa – Back on Track [Prime Video]

Director: Juventus Creators Laboratory | Script: Alessandro D’Ottavi| Cast: Federico Chiesa (car), Francesca Lombardi (car), Lucia Bramani (car), ea | Time to play: 80 minutes | Year: 2023

Those who mainly follow football during the big tournaments will probably have met Federico Chiesa during the postponed Euro Cup in 2021. The Italian youngster started the championship as a substitute but emerged as seasoning with liberating goals. Chiesa played in the final and won, but a few months later things went terribly wrong at his club, Juventus: the winger suffered a serious injury that could have ended his career with a little more bad luck. Federico Chiesa – Back on the right track tells the honest, but ultimately not too surprising story of his rehabilitation.

The documentary begins with inevitable images. After being charged by an opponent, Chiesa falls badly during a competition match in January 2022. In the montage, the first fragments of a fitness room and a player on crutches pass by. The match footage is in black and white and slowed down for the occasion, with the soulful music giving the impression that we’re still watching an announcement trailer.

happy comes get back on track after this heavy start I rested reasonably. What follows is a remarkably sober sports documentary, in which necessary sessions with doctors and physiotherapists alternate with a glimpse into Chiesa’s family life. Tearing the ACL means starting over, the future star realizes; Suddenly “twisting and turning,” as the footballer calls it, is the scariest thing you can do.

It’s not the most obvious choice to make a sports documentary that barely highlights the actual talent of the athletes in question. get back on track It’s reminiscent of the TV documentary in that sense. with both legs, which aired during the same European Championship in which Chiesa excelled, and reviewed the rehabilitation of the Dutch star Memphis Depay. It’s true that Depay is many times more eccentric than the Italian: Chiesa doesn’t do his own rap lyrics, doesn’t have a lion tattooed on his back, and doesn’t seem to be for sale with his (definitely) overpriced Ferrari.

However, both players speak honestly about the importance of family during their rehabilitation process, and show a different side than the macho image of soccer suggests. This personal approach also feels a bit cheap, because we live in an age where showing off your private life is fashionable, but in this case, Chiesa’s family scenes are thought-provoking. If the soccer player had simply been in top form, he might never have been able to attend his brother’s festive graduation ceremony. Do you want to go on vacation with your girlfriend? Okay, so we’ll do your rehab exercises on the beach.

Of course, Chiesa is paid handsomely to live this life, but if get back on track It (perhaps even unintentionally) reveals something, so it’s how the best athletes almost have to experience a landslide before they (force) themselves out of their bubble. In the early stages of his relationship with the model Lucía Bramani, Chiesa already covered up: “This is not how things usually are, soon I will have three games a week and I will always be out.”

It is therefore especially fascinating to follow Chiesa’s rehabilitation process, although this skillful production has an elephant in the room: the successful performance of the doctors and physiotherapists featured in the documentary is itself a public relations campaign for the football club, as evidenced by the prominent mention of the so-called “Juventus Creator Lab” in the credits. A real director is missing or not mentioned by name; the documentary is a product of the club itself.

More and more football clubs are producing their own video content (check out Liverpool’s YouTube channel for example), and when you watch get back on track dominated by generic image direction, the feeling that a separate Prime documentary might be too much credit. At the same time, the location on Prime may attract viewers who are normally ignorant of football, and that’s worth it too. The soccer fan can be myopic: if Chiesa doesn’t play, another star player will appear. Hopefully the outsider watches one more season and then sees a reasonable attempt at a vulnerable character study, made possible in part by an actual horror scenario.

Federico Chiesa – Back on the right track can be seen in first video.