The Italian film-maker Luca Guadagnino, The Crown’s Josh O’Connor and the mononymic megastar Zendaya have delivered the greatest tennis movie in history. Not that the competition is especially stiff, with King Richard, Battle of the Sexes and Strangers on a Train being the best of a rum bunch. But none of those understands tennis, nor luxuriates in its erotic potential, as well as this hyperkinetic and gloriously raunchy affair. This is a film that makes explicit the implicit sensuality of the game, and loudly articulates its furtive carnality.
The premise is essentially “Jules et Jim with topspin” and features O’Connor as Patrick and West Side Story’s Mike Faist as Art, best buddies and tennis pros vying for the affections of Zendaya’s no-nonsense coach Tashi. Complicating matters is Art’s unstable marriage to Tashi, Patrick’s career failure and ostensible penury, and the fact that the men are facing each other in the singles final of a low-key “challenger” tournament in New York state. This increasingly aggressive game provides the present-tense drama for a flashback-filled movie that’s ingeniously structured as, oh yes, a tennis match between now and then.
The screenplay, by the debut writer Justin Kuritzkes, is essentially an unchronological series of (metaphorical) shots and rallies. Some are as short as a single volley, and include just a line of dialogue from the present before we leap back 13 years to the sweetly unfolding relationship between our three teenage protagonists, then novice players at the US Open. They win games, they flirt and they attempt a ménage à trois in a grim Long Island hotel room.
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Other sequences land as longer and more meaningful rallies, as we absorb the trio’s dynamic and witness Patrick’s swaggering self-interest, Art’s earnest insecurities and Tashi’s hardened self-protection. All three characters are impeccably, faultlessly played, with O’Connor handed the most complex part, and required to hint at the smirking fragility beneath the bluster.
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Guadagnino, meanwhile, attacks the tennis with gusto. His camera starts with distant, unemotional and godlike aerial views, yet moves, quickly, as the film becomes more intimate, into the court, on to the net, on to the players (they wear body cameras) and finally, audaciously, seemingly, into the ball itself. The music from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is a driving disco score with hints of early Bronski Beat — entirely suitable for a film that frequently bubbles over with homoeroticism. The mood here is unrestrained. The drama is always compelling. It is, ultimately, a grand slam masterclass.
★★★★★
15, 131min
In cinemas from April 26
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