Intense and intently observed, Teodora Ana Mihai’s “Heysel 85” chronicles the eruption of violence before a major soccer match in Brussels. Its setting is the real Heysel Stadium disaster of 1985, but it presents its drama through fictionalized reporters and local leaders, and thus creates an engrossing political microcosm. Using a combination of staged footage and archival tape, Mihai conjures the era with deft aesthetic control, all while creating a work of commentary that feels distinctly of the now. Even though it comes awfully close to tipping its hand, it remains an anxiety-inducing work of cinéma vérité.
Beginning with a montage of news footage from the day — the notorious May 1985 European Cup final between Italian club Juventus and English rivals Liverpool — the film’s open text informs viewers, or rather warns them, that disturbing historical images may follow. The official record seamlessly gives way to Mihai’s documentary-style 16mm footage, as a Belgium-based Italian reporter, Luca (Matteo Simoni), interviews an enthusiastic young Juventus fan for the radio, a boy who turns out to be Luca’s younger brother. The chaotic sounds of fans streaming into Heysel Stadium cross-pollinates between the real and unreal footage, creating an enveloping atmosphere. The artifice is given away only by the wider aspect ratio of the dramatized elements (compared to the televised 4:3 tape).
With equal panache, and without cutting away, the narrative focus is handed like a baton in a relay race to the arriving Mayor Dumont (Josse De Pauw) and his daughter and press attaché Marie (Violet Braeckman). Their presence draws both the news cameras and the film’s frame inside the stadium’s offices and VIP lounges, trading the real game-day footage of fans for a dramatized tour of otherwise unseen backrooms beneath the stands, all as the roar from the crowd increases outside and up above.
Through both press conferences and private discussions, a number of topics are broached including public safety, but Dumont casts them aside. His focus is on the optics of the game, and on entertaining the arriving Italian dignitaries who’ve come to watch. However, even before the characters realize it, they’re in a disaster movie, as news and whispers start to leak out about bloody confrontations between fans. The conscientious Marie and Luca begin to gather information, while helping people translate between English, Italian, Dutch and French.
Like a blazing inferno, the riot spreads swiftly and suddenly. But as concerned as the reactions may be, politicians and policemen alike seem to knowingly (and preemptively) pass the blame around. Before long, it becomes clear to our good-natured heroes — the attaché and the reporter — that this could have been avoided had egos not got in the way. As the film increasingly ropes in real clips of the day’s events, it expertly cross-cuts them with snaking shots through stadium hallways that grow more crowded with bloodied figures — some injured, some dead — as Marie tries to assess the situation while helping people, and Luca tries to track down his missing family, further personalizing the stakes.
Mihai’s films, including the Cannes Un Certain Regard prizewinner “La Civil” and last year’s Romanian Oscar submission “Traffic,” have long captured women navigating oppressive systems. Her use of Marie — a woman whose ideas are often dismissed in this space — as a point-of-view character speaks to a similar approach. It also reflects Mihai’s own entry point into making a film about a major event in soccer’s history, a topic for which she calls herself an “unusual suspect.”
However, the film’s brief 91-minute runtime does sometimes over-pronounce this thematic focus by drawing attention to specific interactions and reactions laced with misogyny. While this is by all means ethically commendable — the worlds of sport, politics, and sporting politics are known to be hostile to women — it’s also aesthetically awkward in the way it pulls focus and energy from the sweep of the erupting brutality, and the bustle of the ensemble at large. As much as Marie is a key protagonist trying get out from under her father’s thumb, the most important character is arguably the event itself, the way it morphs and mutates, and eventually, spits out bodies.
Despite this, “Heysel 85” proves riveting at every turn. This is due not only to how Mihai and cinematographer Marius Panduru control the frame’s chaotic movement, but to the realism with which the entire production is rendered, from the designs of its costumes and spaces, to the performances that sit effortlessly between naturalistic and symbolic.
For a film such a this to arrive in a FIFA World Cup year is a stark reminder of the entwinement between soccer and corruption, and De Pauw’s performance as Mayor Dumont — a man inclined to compartmentalize and pass the buck — is wonderfully pathetic. However, the human soul here is in Braeckman and Simoni’s utterly committed work as well-meaning people thrust into morally difficult circumstances that leave them torn, each in their own way, between family and social duty.
Even as the mayhem seems temporarily under control, looming questions remain about how to defuse the ticking time bomb that is 60,000 rowdy spectators in an enclosed stadium, a dilemma that especially fans outward into a metaphor for confronting an incendiary, agonized world. There isn’t a moment in “Heysel 85” that doesn’t feel drenched in gasoline, and although its events are over 40 years old, watching them unfold becomes a stark reflection of what it feels like to live in a world teetering on the edge of a knife.
