The depression of a substitute

What happens when you decide to film the highlight of your sporting career, but then barely kick a ball? Stuart Jeffries meets the player who turned his rejection into an art form.

In the summer of 2006, a friend of the French international footballer Vikash Dhorasoo gave him a Super 8 camera and told him to film what happened to him in the next few weeks.

From the start, Dhorasoo couldn't seem to get the hang of the camera: everything he shot, including himself, was slightly out of focus. Like Robin Williams' character in Woody Allen's film Deconstructing Harry, Dhorasoo became a bit of a blur. It wasn't - or so you might think - a propitious start to a film-making career.

But existentially, at least, it was apposite: Dhorasoo never did come back into focus. He was heading off to Germany as one of France's 23-man squad to contest the 2006 World Cup, aboard a team coach that bore the optimistic legend: "Liberte, Egalite ... Jules Rimet." The wheels came off the Gallic bus in the final against Italy, when French legend Zinedine Zidane, stung by an insult, headbutted the Italian defender Marco Materazzi, and France were defeated on penalties. But Dhorasoo's dreams of World Cup glory had faded earlier: he made only two appearances in the tournament, totalling eight minutes, as a substitute in France's first two games.

As a result, the film that he and his friend, the singer and director Fred Poulet, made after that cruel summer is very different from the one they had intended. Dhorasoo explains: "When Fred gave me the camera, we had no idea that it would be a film called Substitute. We had no idea that it would be an avant-garde study of the misery of one man. Me."

If you've ever been dumped, had your dreams crushed, had your very identity stripped inch-by-inch from you by unfeeling hands (that covers about all of you is my guess), then Substitute will resonate with you. "Three days ago against Spain," Dhorasoo tells his camera-therapist-friend at one point, "I felt like crying. I'm not a supporter, I'm a football player - and I'm not playing football."

Dhorasoo's dreams of becoming the first player of south Asian origin to star in the tournament were thus dashed. France coach Raymond Domenech dropped him to the bench - even though the midfielder, then playing at club level for Paris Saint-Germain, had figured in several of the qualifying games. "He betrayed me, and although I admire him, I still don't know why he did it."

Dhorasoo became not a footballing star, but a nobody filming nothing very much - corridors, discarded paperbacks on crumpled beds, another view from another hotel room.

Speaking two years on from the tournament, I ask Dhorasoo if he would have agreed to make the film had he known it would be a dismal, if compelling, portrait of human misery. "I guess I would: the film is something I brought back from Germany. I had nothing else. I wanted to come back with the trophy. But that didn't happen - so at least I returned with something special, this film."

But even that seemed unlikely. His team mates refused to appear on camera, angry that Dhorasoo was making a film that risked exposing the inscrutable privacy of the French dressing room. He and Poulet could not afford to buy footage from the games. As Dhorasoo travelled around Germany with the team, under high-security conditions, Poulet followed, also carrying an 8mm camera. Every now and then Dhorasoo would surreptitiously meet Poulet, who picked up what the player had filmed and gave him more three-minute film stock.

Poulet became so worried by the quality of the material Dhorasoo supplied that he began to think that his own vapid footage - featuring him watching games on big outdoor screens in German town squares over hot dogs and beer - would have to figure in the completed picture. It seemed likely that the German couple whose room Poulet was renting, rather than Dhorasoo, would become the film's stars.

"I guess the whole project was teetering on the brink of disaster," laughs Dhorasoo as he plays with his kids in a Paris park. "But the lack of access, the lack of material, that sense of exclusion and - more importantly - being depressed is what the film is about."

You seemed to be utterly friendless: were you? "It only looks that way because the players wouldn't come on camera." And yet, as France loses the World Cup final and we see team members consoling each other, a desolate Dhorasoo walks alone among the crowds - spiritually crushed.

Unlike the French team, Dhorasoo and Poulet snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. All this seemingly specious material went into Substitute. There's one very long scene in which Dhorasoo and Poulet try to meet to switch tapes in the grounds of the German castle where the teams are staying. The scene manages to contrive an almost homoerotically tender drama of a forbidden tryst. It recalls Pyramus and Thisbe, or the formal beauty of the exquisite scene in Abbas Kiarostami's Through the Olive Trees in which a man pursues his beloved through an olive grove. Such comparisons aren't misplaced: Substitute isn't really about football, but something more - as they say in France - profonde.

I suggest to Dhorasoo that Substitute is aesthetically cherishable partly because it is a film of absences. True, those absences may be frustrating (no Zidane headbutt). Instead of watching footballing glory unfold before us, viewers have to cultivate incidental pleasures - such as trying to work out if those out-of-focus books on Dhorasoo's hotel bed are really by Jonathan Coe and Stefan Zweig (it turns out they are: his MySpace page reveals precocious literary tastes out of the league of most football players).

"That is exactly what Fred and I realised we had when we got back. We had nothing really except me collapsing into depression. The question then was, what do we do with it? Answer: make a film about depression." Poulet, though, suggests there was some pre-meditation in the project, saying the football was "like a Trojan horse so we could make cinema".

Substitute has been hailed by French critics, but also satirised for its pretensions. There is a droll YouTube pastiche in which an unidentified protagonist lying on a hotel bed cleans dead skin from his toes and fills in a crossword. But then exasperating audiences has long been a tactic of French film-makers - ever since Godard in his 1967 movie Weekend did a tracking shot along a traffic jam for what felt like decades. Soon, no doubt, Substitute will figure in that long entry in film encyclopedias entitled "ennui in French cinema, uses of".

That said, Substitute is part of that strange new phenomenon - the decent film about football. Hitherto, football films made up a dire genre of which Escape to Victory was the leading example. The genre has been transformed, thanks to films such as Douglas Gordon's Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait.

"I never did get the hang of Super 8," Dhorasoo says. "But that gives the film its quality, the specificity of its aesthetic."

This is true: Substitute looks like a home movie about football shot by a nouvelle vague director who detests the game, using venerable technology as part of his armoury of Brechtian alienation techniques. You can hear the camera whirring, the images are blurred, the sound crunchy. It's seemingly a formalistic critique of the smarmy mise-en-scene of televised football.

"The specificity of its aesthetic" isn't the kind of phrase many British footballers would have in their verbal locker. But then Dhorasoo has no parallel in the Premiership, though in his eloquence, his reported truculence and in his bouts of depression, he's a cross between Graeme le Saux, Lee Bowyer and Stan Collymore. And what happened to Dhorasoo after the World Cup?

"The fact that I made this film gave me the spiritual strength to carry on in football for a few more years." Earlier this year, aged 34, he retired from the Italian club Livorno.

There were reports in the British tabloids, I tell Dhorasoo, that the season after the World Cup, Paris Saint-Germain terminated your contract for biting off the ear of a team-mate in training. Dhorasoo says he can't understand my French. Like when Mike Tyson bit Evander Holyfield? "Biting? I never bit anybody."

What does he do now? He says hopes, "now I'm a star", to emulate his fellow French internationals Djibril Cisse and Eric Cantona and appear in more movies.

When, in Substitute, we see Dhorasoo getting booed by patriotic crowds as he replaces France's footballing hero Zidane in a pre-World Cup friendly against Mexico, he takes the jeers with a stoical attitude born of socialistic principle.

"These people who come to the stadium hissing and hating me, I defend them because they are the masses, people who came from tough estates just like me. (Dhorasoo was raised on a council estate in Harfleur, Normandy.)

"Even if I had nothing to do with them politically or socially, I will stand up for them."

Noble words: thanks to the likes of Vikash Dhorasoo, professional football, that obscene handmaiden of global capitalism, can sometimes still be the beautiful game.