Ronaldo is a new film about the Real Madrid star. Photo / AP
Ronaldo is a new film about the Real Madrid star. Photo / AP
There is a scene at the end of the new film about Cristiano Ronaldo's surreal and strange life when his mother, Maria Dolores dos Santos Aveiro, explains how differently things may have been.
"I wanted to have an abortion but God did not want that to happen," she says to camera. "Cristiano was an unwanted baby but he's given me so much joy."
Earlier, there was another scene that is no less revealing but for different reasons. It is shot at Ronaldo's table in a restaurant while he is with friends.
"Tell me the best player in the world?" he asks, before quickly answering "me" and bursting into animated laughter.
His friends are initially hesitant but once he starts bellowing, they do as well. Then he raises a finger and the laughter must stop. On cue, it does.
"Until January," he says, a nod to his obsession with the Ballon d'Or award for the world's best player.
Together, those two scenes offer a neat summary of a fascinating film, which shares plenty of warm, interesting perspectives of a great athlete but also largely cements the impression that Ronaldo, for all of the love he clearly holds for his family, feels at least an equal attraction to himself.
On one hand, we see the Ronaldo who dotes on his five-year-old son and comforts his own widowed mother as she takes sedatives to deal with the anxiety of watching her boy play.
On the other, we see the Ronaldo of popular depiction, surrounded by people who, in the course of the 92-minute film, barely challenge a word he says. He is the king of his surreal world and is pretty pleased about it all.
The vanity of his personality is surely why he agreed to allow such access, which included the mounting of a camera in his shower - he spends a lot of time topless, believe it or not - and totalled 14 months of filming by the makers of the brilliant Senna movie.
Ultimately, the film is compelling. It opens with him describing his pain at seeing Lionel Messi win a fourth Ballon d'Or - Ronaldo plainly attaches enormous value to the award, regardless of what he might say elsewhere about the greater good of team glories - and it loosely tracks his journey to winning the gong for the third time earlier this year.
Along the way, and between his and his agent's frequent attempts to put the blame of his poor World Cup last year on injury, the insights are numerous.
Cristiano and Dolores. Photo / AP
There is a shot of him deliberating over which underpants to select from a draw organised with an obsessive's touch. There are, in deeper moments, memories from Ronaldo and his family of his late father's alcoholism.
"Although he never mistreated his children, I became his victim," says Ronaldo's mother.
His brother, Hugo, talks about his own addictions, and his mother speaks of the feeling she "abandoned" Ronaldo when he left Madeira for Lisbon, aged 12, to join Sporting.
Ronaldo says: "I cried every day. People say we have money and cars but we suffered."
Significant attention is paid to what his life is like, including one scene where a fan breaks down in tears after scaling a fence to meet him. "He knows I exist," she sobs.
Another fan later yells at him through a closed taxi window because he did not sign her ball.
The claustrophobia comes across, but his melancholic claim to being an "isolated person" jars with the amount of time he spent in the past 12 years hunting cameras.
What is not in doubt is Ronaldo's affection for his son, Cristiano, who at one stage flusters his father by saying a stranger in the street is "bigger than you". He also offers to teach Ronaldo how to take penalties.
Those moments add up to a unique look at a modern great of football, who nearly never was. To Ronaldo's preening satisfaction, his mother made a different decision.
