High Gloss Finish

In preparation for collaborating on an op-ed about the meaning and importance of the fact that Cristiano Ronaldo’s team paid $375,000 to a woman who had accused him of sexual assault I thought I would watch Ronaldo, Cristiano Ronaldo’s 2015 self-titled self-hagiography. I was curious about its gender story.

The only woman who features in this languid cinematic pan over Ronaldo’s material and physical assets is Ronaldo’s mother, and she features significantly — she is no small part of his domestic life. In the film, she identifies herself as a victim of violent domestic abuse at the hands of Ronaldo’s father (who died in 2005). She takes tranquilizers to calm herself when watching important matches. She describes Ronaldo as an “unwanted child” — she had wanted an abortion. Abortion, however,  was only recently decriminalized in Portugal, in 2008. Thank goodness, she and her son declare. This is no small part of CR’s personal mythology. He is the redeemer – the man who redeems his father and his mother. The man who redeems his own unwanted existence.

And then there is the peculiar erasure of the identity of the mother of his cherubic first child, named, like the film, after him. No one knows who the mother is or the nature of the pregnancy. The film underlines Ronaldo’s insistence on keeping this information close. Normally it is not a child’s maternity which is in question but its paternity. Cristiano Ronaldo has the money, the power and the legal team to reverse even this most basic ordering of things. 

He is surrounded by marble, steel and glass — he lives in a corporate fortress not quite as imposing of that of his agent, Jorge Mendes who, at one point, says that not only is Ronaldo like a son to him — Ronaldo’s mother, Mendes says at a family dinner, is the mother he wished he’d had himself. 

Women who are not Ronaldo’s mother figure only in the background as they gather in screaming hoards outside his hotel, outside practice fields — at one point in the film a woman runs onto a field and is tackled. She is actually introduced to him. Benevolent god that he is, he takes a picture with her. As she is led away, tears streaming down her face, she says to the camera that she hopes he will follow her on Twitter.