VOD film review: Arsène Wenger: Invincible
Review Overview
The man
8The manager
8David Farnor | On 28, Nov 2021
Director: Gabriel Clarke, Christian Jeanpierre
Cast: Arsène Wenger, Thierry Henry, Dennis Bergkamp, Ian Wright
Certificate: 12
Football managers, these days, are like buses, each one appearing unpredictably and often replaced at the last minute for another service. For a football manager to stay at a club for more than a decade is a feat not seen since the days of Arsène Wenger and Alex Ferguson. The former ultimately left Arsenal in a cloud of fan frustration, but this documentary is a corrective to that perception of his 22 years at the club.
Framed against the backdrop of the team’s still unprecedented “Invincible” season of 2003-04, the only time a Premier League team has not been defeated all season, it’s a film that serves as something of a love letter to the football fanatic, who arrived at the club as a professor-like intellectual and graduated from outsider to insider and ultimately outcast. Co-director Gabriel Clarke has previously given us profiles of Jack Charlton and Bobby Robson and he doesn’t drop the ball here, kicking up into the air enough questions to give us a sense of Arsène the man.
A key part of that, of course, is Arsène the manager, and the film deftly weaves together the professional drive and personal passion for the sport – Arsène talks about football as an addiction, and we see footage of him working late as the norm. Even the way the film is presented, which sees Arsène sitting in a dark warehouse, his highlights projected on a giant wall in front of him, gives us a sense of the man’s character – introspective and focused.
It’s telling that the players line up to pay tribute, from Patrick Viera and Emmanuel Petit to Dennis Bergkamp. They give us an insight into his tactical thinking, which coupled with his physical standards to form an unbeatable team – there’s a lot of talk about what he stopped, discouraged and avoided, and that discipline is echoed by the man’s stern exterior. And yet there’s also a warm tutor-like vibe to the recollections, with Thierry Henry talking of how he was unexpectedly moved out of his natural midfielder position only to become a much better striker, and with Alex Ferguson’s respect from the across the aisle as earned as it is evident.
We get some time with Arsène in his home village of Duttlenheim, and perhaps could do with some more to build on his childhood and Catholic faith, but it’s the all-consuming career that aptly defines much of his legacy and personality, from the way that he felt hurt and sick after losses right down to the point where he admits he stayed at Arsenal too long. There’s a poignancy to what becomes a borderline confessional. “The end of a love story is always sad,” he muses. That this love story lasted so long only adds to its weight.