‘My Tennis Maestro’ review: Pierfrancesco Favino charms as a faded Italian tennis pro

Dir: Andrea Di Stefano. Italy. 2025. 125mins

Having made 4 hard-boiled crime films in each English (together with his 2014 debut, Escobar: Paradise Misplaced) and Italian (2023 Berlin title The Final Evening Of Amore), Italian director Andrea Di Stefano now serves up a tennis comedy set within the late Eighties. This story of a teenage tennis star and his former-champion coach is bouyed by a pair of glowing performances, from Tiziano Menichelli and Pierfrancesco Favino respectively, that play out as one lengthy match-point rally.

Bouyed by a pair of glowing performances

It’s a wise transfer given Italy’s widespread tennis fever, as whipped up by present world primary Jannik Sinner. And actor Favino has change into, in Italy at the very least, the starriest of A-listers and one thing of a nationwide treasure. Elsewhere, My Tennis Maestro will present an fascinating take a look at case. Italian comedies not often fly properly overseas, however this well-crafted charmer might show to be an exception to the rule.

The interval setting helps, as does the truth that the movie’s saturated, Technicolor look and soundtrack of basic Italian pop by Loredana Berté, Patty Pravo and different dolce vita darlings drags us again from the ostensible late Eighties setting in direction of the Nineteen Sixties. And simply as Italian comedy classics like Dino Risi’s The Simple Life (1962) typically put the emphasis on the ‘bitter’ of ‘bittersweet’, so do My Tennis Maestro. Not many sports activities movies, outdoors of documentaries, are so fascinated with failure. The positive script will get away with this potential downer as a result of it’s typically very humorous, and since it performs a swap and bait. By the top, we realise that the story isn’t actually about sport in any respect; it’s about rising up.

In his third function, teenage actor Menichelli is superb as Felice (which suggests ’completely satisfied’), a centered 13-year-old who we first meet as a proficient regional tennis participant. He’s a wound spring – the winder being his dad-coach Pietro (an pleasing Giovanni Ludeno), who retains his son on a decent regime of early nights and countless coaching classes. Pietro’s favorite tactic issolid baseline play: “volleys and web play are for wealthy children”, he tells his dutiful son. However when Felice earns the precise to progress to nationwide degree, dad reluctantly steps apart and invests all his financial savings within the teaching providers of Favino’s Raul Gatti, a former professional who as soon as “made it to the final 16 within the Italian Open”.

Now a wreck of a sportsman, recent out of a long-stay clinic with a lithium carbonate prescription, Raul nonetheless is aware of a factor or two about tennis, and he can even activate the attraction with the women – a behavior, we’ll uncover, that has not at all times served him properly previously. It’s not simply his new coach’s laid-back instructing model that wrong-foots his pushed, sanctimonious new pupil, it’s additionally the truth that, for the primary time, he’s being tutored by a man who doesn’t want him – Raul even dozes off throughout a match.

On court docket, Felice is so filled with aggressive fury and stress that he appears like he’d break in two should you touched him. Off-duty, he’s tongue-tied, awkward round ladies, youthful in method than his 13 years. Raul stares at him, at occasions, as if he’s a Martian – however he additionally feels for the child.

My Tennis Maestro is sweet on the humdrum trivia of the junior sports activities circuit – the unhappy, out-of-season seaside inns, the sheer quantity of stuff that must be lugged about, the countless ready round, the dusty trophy cabinets, the nostalgic camaraderie between coaches remembering distant feats of their heroes or themselves. It’s, ultimately, just a bit overlong, however not sufficient to dilute its attraction.