We have had some sparky tennis movies recently, such as Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers and Reinaldo Marcus Green’s King Richard, and it seemed at first as if this coming-of-age comedy from Italian actor turned director Andrea Di Stefano could be joining them. But despite a very robust lead performance from Pierfrancesco Favino, the enjoyably grizzled alpha male of Italian cinema, this completely runs aground in the third act, quite unable to decide if it should offer the traditional comeback story of an underdog sports movie, or if it should pursue its implied repudiation of the win-at-all-costs ethic. The other issue is whether its young hero should ignore what his dad has to say in favour of an attractive, if flawed, new mentor. The film does in fact appear finally to get off the fence on this last point, but not very satisfyingly or convincingly, and the final wink to the camera is irritating and misjudged.
The setting is the early 1980s and Tiziano Menichelli plays Felice, a 13-year-old kid who has been fanatically schooled by his dad in Italian tennis’s lower, relatively undemanding “regionals” competition. Felice has been taught to revere the stolid, machine-like baseline play of Ivan Lendl, and Felice’s grinding efficiency wears down his opponents. But the father then decides that his son deserves glory at the national level and to that end hires a professional coach with money the hard-pressed family really doesn’t have. That coach is the handsome, charming and yet somehow unreliable Raul “the Cat” Gatti, played with grinning machismo by Favino, who once got to the last 16 of a big competition, was pictured in the gossip mags, but dissipated his talent with booze and womanising, and now desperately needs the money after recovering from a breakdown in a clinic, a subject the movie treats with cheerful bad taste.
While on the road with his new young pupil, doing the more demanding national under-16 tour, Pavino tells young Felice to forget about boring old Lendl and instead idolise the impossibly glamorous figure of Guillermo Vilas, the Argentinian man-about-town who loved clubbing and the good things in life, even or especially before a big game. But sobersided Felice won’t loosen up and it seems that his baseline style is crumbling in the face of attacking play from opponents in this higher league. Young Felice has got to come up to the net – in tennis, and in life itself.
It all looks good for an enjoyable, sentimental comedy, and yet the movie’s running time drags closer and closer to the finish without Felice either winning a match or winning any new wisdom outside the court; nor is Raul coming to terms with his demons, which turn out to be far more complex and disconcertingly serious than we thought. Really, the movie can’t tie up all the loose ends it lays out in front of us. At the very beginning, Di Stefano hints that this film is inspired by moments from his own life, and real life can indeed be messy and complicated and fail to fit the Hollywoodised narrative template. This needed some script revision.
My Tennis Maestro screened at the Venice film festival.
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