![\"'My](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/1458725_tennismaestro_961803.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Dir: Andrea Di Stefano. Italy. 2025. 125mins<\/p>\n
Having made four hard-boiled crime movies in both English (including his 2014 debut, Escobar: Paradise Lost) and Italian (2023 Berlin title The Last Night Of Amore), Italian director Andrea Di Stefano now serves up a tennis comedy set in the late 1980s. This tale of a teenage tennis star and his former-champion trainer is bouyed by a pair of sparkling performances, from Tiziano Menichelli and Pierfrancesco Favino respectively, that play out as one long match-point rally.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Bouyed by a pair of sparkling performances<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a smart move given Italy\u2019s widespread tennis\u00a0fever, as whipped up by current world number one Jannik Sinner. And actor Favino has become, in Italy at least, the starriest of A-listers and something of a national treasure. Elsewhere, My Tennis Maestro will provide an interesting test case. Italian comedies rarely fly well abroad, but this well-crafted charmer could prove to be an exception to the rule.<\/p>\n
The period setting helps, as does the fact that the film\u2019s saturated, Technicolor look and soundtrack of classic Italian pop by Loredana Bert\u00e9, Patty Pravo and other dolce vita darlings drags us back from the ostensible late 1980s setting towards the 1960s. And just as Italian comedy classics like Dino Risi\u2019s The Easy Life (1962) often put the emphasis on the \u2018bitter\u2019 of \u2018bittersweet\u2019, so do My Tennis Maestro.\u00a0Not many sports films, outside of documentaries, are so interested in failure. The fine script gets away with this potential downer because it\u2019s often very funny, and because it performs a switch and bait. By the end, we realise that the story isn\u2019t really about sport at all; it\u2019s about growing up.<\/p>\n
In his third role, teenage actor Menichelli is excellent as Felice (which means \u2019happy\u2019), a focused 13-year-old who we first meet as a talented regional\u00a0tennis\u00a0player. He is a wound spring \u2013 the winder being his dad-coach Pietro (an enjoyable Giovanni Ludeno), who keeps his son on a tight regime of early nights and endless training sessions. Pietro\u2019s favourite tactic issolid baseline play: \u201cvolleys and net play are for rich kids\u201d, he tells his dutiful son. But when Felice earns the right to progress to national level, dad reluctantly steps aside and invests all his savings in the coaching services of Favino\u2019s Raul Gatti, a former pro who once \u201cmade it to the last 16 in the Italian Open\u201d.<\/p>\n
Now a wreck of a sportsman, fresh out of a long-stay clinic with a lithium carbonate prescription, Raul still knows a thing or two about\u00a0tennis, and he can also turn on the charm with the ladies \u2013 a habit, we will discover, that has not always served him well in the past. It\u2019s not just his new coach\u2019s laid-back teaching style that wrong-foots his driven, sanctimonious new pupil, it\u2019s also the fact that, for the first time, he is being tutored by a guy who doesn\u2019t need him \u2013 Raul even dozes off during a match.<\/p>\n
On court, Felice is so full of competitive fury and tension that he looks like he\u2019d break in two if you touched him. Off-duty, he\u2019s tongue-tied, awkward around girls, younger in manner than his 13 years. Raul stares at him, at times, as if he\u2019s a Martian \u2013 but he also feels for the kid.<\/p>\n
My\u00a0Tennis\u00a0Maestro\u00a0is good on the humdrum minutiae of the junior sports circuit \u2013 the sad, out-of-season seaside hotels, the sheer amount of stuff that needs to be lugged about, the endless waiting around, the dusty trophy shelves, the nostalgic camaraderie between coaches remembering distant feats of their heroes or themselves. It is, in the end, just a little overlong, but not enough to dilute its charm.<\/p>\n
Production companies: Indiana Production, Indigo Film, Vision Distribution<\/p>\n