Lost in Showbiz has a new cultural hero. His name is Frédéric Auburtin, and judging by a charmingly rueful interview with the New York Times, his next feature film will not be trailed with the teaser: “FROM THE DIRECTOR WHO BOUGHT YOU UNITED PASSIONS … YOU KNOW, THE FIFA VANITY MOVIE”.

But we’ll come to his long-suffering review of his own work shortly.

That movie, as indicated, is United Passions, the cinematic drama about Fifa’s glorious works which was commissioned by Sepp Blatter, and is actually no more of a work of fiction than real-life Fifa initiatives such as the Diaspora Legacy Programme.

If you’ve yet to make time for it, there is much to enjoy, not least Tim Roth as Blatter, doing his best to rise above the fact he’s taken a script that probably called for “a Tim Roth type”. Also the majestic characterisation of the English. “Negroes?” one inquires. “Playing football? Why not women while we’re at it? That would be quite amusing, eh?” (Why are we always portrayed like this? It’s a mystery as unsolvable as the one Kristin Scott-Thomas recently gestured toward, when she complained about mostly being asked to play unpleasant ice queens.)

Blatter commissioned this movie with £16m of Fifa’s loose change to glorify Fifa, but mostly its longtime president. (Can you imagine the statuary in his doubtless palatial home? It must make Saddam’s decor look self-effacing.) “Open, self-critical and highly enjoyable,” was the review of Fifa general secretary Jerome Valcke, who would make an excellent film critic for someone. Is the Rikers Island Gazette hiring? I’m kidding, Jerome! For the record, you deny all knowledge of a $10m payment to Jack Warner, following a request for said transfer to be made in a letter addressed to yourself.

United Passions review – Fifa propaganda is pure cinematic excrement Read more

Unfortunately, United Passions has just had its US release, having already opened last year in key territories such as Serbia and Azerbaijan. And director Auburtin has accordingly been called up by the New York Times, and asked to explain himself.

I read the entire article in sigh-o-vision, imagining the air of polite resignation with which he recounted his part in the matter. “I didn’t have the freedom to do a Michael Moore movie at all,” he told the paper. “If I started the movie with flashlights and sirens coming to Zurich, like what happened last Wednesday – I knew if we would write any line like this, everyone would say: ‘What are you doing, man? Come on.’” The experience of the movie’s producer – a Mr Sepp Blatter – breathing down his neck appears not to have been creatively ideal. “Every time we are showing something about Blatter himself,” he explains, “it’s very, very difficult because the guy is the boss.”

For all his admissions of total artistic compromise, Auburtin is far too decent to disown the movie. “I totally accept, and am very responsible, and I have no regrets,” he said. “But I did not wake up in the morning and say, ‘Let’s do a movie about Fifa.’”

Instead, he was offered it, the Times explains, because he was a football fan “who could also turn round a movie quickly”. He would have liked things to have been different, “but I accept the job. I know Fifa is producing the film. As we say in France, don’t be more royalist than the king: don’t be the king if you are not the king.”

Fifa film United Passions is PR exercise rankling even with its stars Read more

This is French for: listen, kid, we all gotta eat.

In fact, it’s not so much an artistic compromise as an artistic surrender, with punitive reparations. But for all that, and all the known monstrosity of Fifa the film declines to show, I defy you not to warm rather to Auburtin, who embodies a cultural reality too rarely celebrated – particularly given it underpins a non-scientific 92% of culture. Namely, that sometimes it’s just a paycheck. You’re not going for trophies, you’re not making creative history. You’re just doing the most competent job you can in the circumstances, which are some way from ideal, and hoping that you’ll have a more noble success at some point in the future. But not on this project. This project’s a shitter, and you know it. Only the terminally grand will claim never to have done a day’s work like this. The rest of us are in the gutter.

Some of us are even stars. At the top end of this scale, for instance, you have the likes of Michael Caine, whose quote on his turn in Jaws 4 is positively legendary. “I have never seen it,” Caine told an interviewer, “but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.” I expect these days Michael would be reminded to check his privilege, so let’s remember that for so many people lower down the chain, something like Jaws 4 would only build a modest shed, or a Lego City house.

It’s not just movies, of course. You should never trust a hack who thinks they’re an artist either. Recalling his journalistic mentor, former Times editor Charlie Wilson, the brilliant Matthew Parris once said: “Charlie, foremost among others, instilled in me the understanding that journalism is a trade, not an art or a work of genius. Inspiration matters, but in the end it is filling the space with an artefact, and doing so promptly.”

Ain’t that the truth. God knows I have lost count of even the times that I’ve lost count of how many absolute shockers I’ve put through – indeed, there’s every chance I will finish typing what follows reflecting that it really should be allowed to go to the journalistic equivalent of Dignitas (Indignitas?) and be put out of its misery. Once, such verbal corpses were the proverbial fish-and-chip paper, accessible only by newspaper-cuttings archives or people who spent several hours a day surfing microfiche in their local libraries. (Who were those people? Did anyone ever find out?) Now they can be read on the internet for all eternity, which is the main reason journalists write much more in the digital age: to dilute the concentration of cobblers they have previously filed, until the rubbish articles are in homeopathic concentration. It doesn’t work, of course – much like homeopathy, in fact.

Yes, it’s only a trade – but for Monsieur Auburtin, the agony is rather more exquisite. Who knows by what cosmic twist of fate the long-scheduled US release of his movie coincided with the week – the very week! – the FBI blew Fifa wide open, but it has given his bad day at the office more attention than he could possibly have dreamed of in his worst nightmares.

By way of a consolation, I insist that the Academy institutes a new, reality-based category at the Oscars next year. Call it Best Instance of Professional Adequacy in Extremely Unsatisfactory Circumstances, and make Auburtin its inaugural winner.