The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
Zendaya’s love triangle serves up racket-twanging steaminess
where Patrick and Art face each other for the first time in years, as Tashi looks on from the front row of the crowd. From this narrative baseline, the plot shuttles back and forth through time, whistling into the past then back to the present, sometimes in elegantly arcing drop shots, sometimes eardrum-splitting smashes.
Screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes expects us to keep up, but despite its complexity his structure is intuitive and smooth, and we soon understand that this ostensibly low-stakes clash is in fact the climax of this trio’s professional and amorous lives.
What makes their chemistry so good? Desire zings through almost every gesture – look at how O’Connor self-soothingly holds a Coke bottle to his lips while gazing at Tashi across a garden party.
Or how Patrick and Art paw at each other’s faces while sharing churros in a cafeteria, dusting one another’s cheeks and hair with sugar in the process. (When was the last time a Hollywood film made you want to reach, in a good way, for a wet wipe?)
As for the ménage à trois teased in the trailers, it’s mild in terms of bodily mechanics, but has real formative heat, locking these characters on a course that’s both wildly self-destructive yet fires all three to new professional heights.
And how’s the tennis? Perhaps as tense as cinema has seen since Hitchcock’s with scalpelly editing, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s counterintuitively perfect house-music score, and camera angles that had me regularly ducking to the side of oncoming shots. The staging becomes significantly wilder in the grand finale – a final-set tiebreak, naturally – in which the preceding two hours of sexual tension finally zaps down to earth.
“Come on!” Tashi yells, involuntarily. Or at least I think she does. I couldn’t swear it wasn’t me.