2024-05-03 20:04:00
Art Donaldson is not having the best season. The luxurious spaces of the white-grey furnished apartment suggest that he has already achieved a number of successes on the court. Now comes the key moment of the career: the tennis player needs to find out if he has any winning Grand Slams ahead of him. Despite the seemingly simple plot, the American drama Rivals, which is being shown in Czech cinemas, is not only about tennis.
Italian director Luca Guadagnino is one of the most remarkable stylists in contemporary cinema. The author, who became famous for the summer gay romance Give Me Your Name and then toyed with the conventions of horror in the films Suspiria and To the Bone, has now made his most spectacular film.
Rivals begins as a story about a sports and, apparently, a partnership crisis. The hero Art receives a clear instruction from his wife and coach played by Zendaya: to go to a smaller tournament to gain confidence. The decision leads to an unexpected meeting. A rousing sports romance ensues, all set up like a tennis match. It introduces viewers to several time planes and reveals a complicated relationship triangle. All this with the power of a smash that has the power to take the audience’s head off – or anything else that gets in the way of the fired ball.
The plot soon returns to the time when Art played by Mike Faist and his best friend Patrick played by Josh O’Connor were among the hopes of American tennis. Only one star of their generation was brighter: Art’s current wife and mother of his daughter, Tashi, incomparably beautiful, with an incomparably quick, powerful delivery.
At the fancy party of her main sponsor Adidas, the boys forget to drink lemonade as they stare at the girl. And she wraps them both around her finger. Now, decades later, the two face each other on the field. And Tashi observes their rivalry.
Justin Kuritzkes’ screenplay does not end with a simple and unproblematic love scene. Director Guadagnino fills with intensity and passion not only situations in bed, but also on the courts. A sports machete may never have had such a lascivious, disturbing energy. The filmmaker doesn’t aim for realism, tennis fans will surely find more satisfaction in sports dramas like Borg/McEnroe from 2017.
Former friends Art played by Mike Faist and Patrick played by Josh O’Connor meet after years on opposite sides of the court. | Photo: Niko Tavernis
Rivals do not focus so much on purely tennis disputes or frustrations, the rivalry here takes place on other axes. The protagonists are drowning in minor and major betrayals and manipulations. One tension arises on the axis of career versus love, another touches the line between friendship and love feelings. In addition, Guadagnino plays with gender stereotypes.
So when former friends and teammates Art and Patrick meet on opposite sides of the court after decades in a consecutive qualifying tournament, much is at stake. And winning the local trophy actually came in last place.
The creators play wild formal games with the space of the court, which turn the match into something even otherworldly. They constantly switch perspectives, from exciting exchanges they run away to variously distant pasts in order to fill in the gaps in the characters’ relationships between the individual “fifteens”. And so they showed the audience what is behind the tennis match, which has the intensity of a match in a cage.
Rivals may sometimes mask the fact that they are not as sophisticated as they might seem with a refined narrative structure. It is a variation on the love triangle and sports drama themes.
The creators are looking for sometimes obvious, sometimes surprising ambiguities – for example, about how even a love relationship can be built with similar efficiency and purpose as a sports career. However, Guadagnino slightly disturbs these parallels and schemes with his queer perspective and also by playing a strange game with the audience in terms of style.
Czech cinemas have been showing Rivals since last Thursday. | Video: Vertical Entertainment
The aesthetics of Rivals is partly based on clear attacks on the audience: the balls fly right next to the camera, the hall is crowded almost like a 3D projection.
Attacks of intense techno music by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross or shots from unexpected angles, for example from an extreme soffit, as if the camera were underground and the court was transparent, have a similar impact. Everything culminates in the moment when the camera is glued directly to the ball of both opponents.
Even the melodramatic line in places becomes ostentatiously intensified, one of the final scenes takes place in the middle of an apocalyptic storm. In doing so, we follow heroes who have done various things in the past.
There are no positive and negative characters, some hardships are obvious, yet it remains a mystery until the last moment who really loves whom, who is pretending, who is a loser and who is a success.
Rivals is an intense drama also because, both on the narrative and formal level, they constantly intertwine, where the passion for the sport or for the other begins and ends, or when ulterior motives, disturbing factors and manipulations of various kinds are introduced into tennis performances and partnerships.
Luca Guadagnino made a film in which figuratively speaking – on and off the court – real emotional outbursts are interspersed with acts reminiscent of hard porn, although there is practically no nudity in the film, unless you count some of the penises in the men’s locker rooms. It is precisely how difficult it is at times to distinguish between performance and emotion, and how much Guadagnino deceives us with what he actually serves up, that makes Rivals a remarkable work.
Film
Rivals
Directed by: Luca Guadagnino
Vertical Entertainment, Czech premiere on April 25.