Two exceptional football documentaries unveiled at the 79th Cannes Film Festival have deftly pushed the Beautiful Game beyond the confines of sport and into the realms of history, poetry and psychoanalysis.Argentine directors Juan Cabral and Santiago Franco’s The Match (El Partido) attempts a particularly complex feat. It condenses 220 years of history and geopolitics in a single 90-minute football clash between Argentina and England. Forty years on, that 1986 match is still regarded as one the greatest to be ever played.The second football film, Cantona, made by David Tryhorn and Ben Nicholas, is a deep dive into the mind of the iconic but always controversial Éric Cantona, whose five years at Manchester United in the 1990s went into football folklore for eternity and made him the most gifted French footballer of his generation.“You are in the story that you create, not in the reality of the world. It is like cinema,” footballer-turned-actor Cantona says on camera as he helps the British directing duo make sense of the perplexing upheavals and career- threatening outbursts that rocked the ‘fiery’ Frenchman. He careened through as many as eight clubs in a decade until Man United and [team manager] Alex Ferguson happened to him.On the CroisetteFour years in the works, the Cantona documentary forays into the highs and lows of his explosive career, piecing together his action-packed story with the help of interviews with Ferguson, former footballers David Beckham and Guy Roux, and his parents.This is Cantona’s third time in Cannes. He was here as an actor in 2009 with Ken Loach’s Competition title, Looking for Eric. Five years later, he had a role in Kristian Levring’s out-of-competition entry The Salvation, starring Mads Mikkelsen.This year, besides the documentary on his life and career, Cantona the actor is in first-time director Avril Besson’s Les Matins Merveilleux, a film much like the documentary about him. It is playing as part of the festival’s Special Screenings section.