One Day in Europe

From the lofty foundation of the Olympic Movement to the nutty jingoism of ‘Escape to Victory’, the connection between sport and international relations is well established. A multi-stranded, multilingual, multi-location portmanteau piece, ‘One Day in Europe’ seems designed to mine this seam, but despite contriving a pivotal event with the potential to tap into many contemporary European concerns – a fictitious Champions League final between Spain’s Deportivo de La Coruña and Turkey’s Galatasaray, played in Moscow – it offers little insight into either sport or politics. The gentle pleasures of its character comedy, meanwhile, are diluted by the similarities between its four tales: each concerns the theft, genuine or fabricated, of a tourist’s property and their culturally and linguistically strained attempts to deal with local people and police.

The first story is the best, with an enjoyably ripening rapport between testy young English art buyer Megan Gay and fussily helpful Moscow mama Luidmila Tsvetkova; then we cut to Istanbul, where cabbie Erdal Yildiz lends a hand to German backpacker Florian Lukas when a bullish cop is sceptical of his claims to victimhood. Next, the theft of naive Hungarian intellectual Péter Scherer’s camera in Santiago de Compostela proves of limited interest to self-satisfied policeman Miguel de Lira; and finally, in Berlin, French street entertainers Rachida Brakni and Boris Arquier trawl the suburbs looking to get robbed to claim the insurance. The political implications are straightforward enough – when cultures meet there’s potential for cooperation and exploitation on both sides – and the particular challenges of integrating Russia and Turkey with their neighbours to the west get little attention; football itself gets none at all.