The unconventional nature of a film like this is incredibly brave Last night of Love (2023), how indecisive and wide the pace of a work remains interesting The Master. It happens even to good people and even together Pierfrancesco Favino the absolute protagonist on stage, in the role of a strange and melancholic eighties tennis coach with some mental problems and a lot of skeletons in the closet. Let’s be clear. Roman director, with Hollywood experience, Andrea Di Stefano he’s not one to repeat Italian dining clichés, quite the opposite. He is a director who knows how to juggle the camera with ease, who knows how to make a little-known setting come alive and lively by blending intimacy, gender dynamics, and a number of spectacularities in the performances.
The Masterafter all, is a friendship film with a boy who dreams of becoming a tennis champion (played by Felice Tiziano Menichelli) was accustomed by his pedantic and stubborn father to play elementary tennis like Ivan Lendl and a master (the Raul Gatti of Favino) with a half-glorious past, numbed by psychotropic drugs, depressed and lusting after beautiful women, who instead he sees tennis as the joy of Guillermo Vilas-style pulsating net play. Two figures who seem to be opposites but still need each other. The starting point of the action is taking part in the stages of a junior tournament by car in half of Italy where Felice, obviously, will lose every encounter with her father shouting on the phone, and Gatti is more concerned about his colleagues’ skirts.
In short, The Master it begins with a lot of panache, with a wonderful comic spirit, as if Di Stefano’s cinema was surfing and nimbly skimming through the details of the story, needing to push the accelerator on the mixture of Gatti and Felice. The trouble started when a lump of Gatti’s past needed to be cleared awayunrolled, made to appear within the framework of a lively duet. And at the first pit stop, Gatti’s madness attacks with the destruction of the hotel lobby as Il Maestro begins to creak. Feelings while we watch the film in 2025 Venice Film Festival it’s still very sharp. It’s a sparkling dictation, even melodramatic in its arrival Edwige Fenech of the honor of an autograph, which suddenly cooled the audience. There is a lot of disorientation in the writing that is depressing The Master really starting from scratch. Except the movie doesn’t start again and tries to repeat the first half hour as if nothing happened. To stay on the automotive metaphor side, the film machine shuts down. The acts are not just two, but even three, with the third, a bolder turning point in the writing, which in an even grander way extends a series of discoveries about Gatti’s past that on the one hand definitively buries the plot of Felice and the Family, and on the other adds a series of ballast details as is often the case in many films. Alexander Payne.
In the end the morality that wants to pass, that a happy existence even without being, sorry, a Sinner (or Alcaraz)it passes, but breaks into pieces to get a neat shine. Favino as usual literally gets into the clothes (we mention Mariano Tufano’s truly evocative vintage research into his costumes) this a playful bastard incapable of being a father, an older brother, a manwith eerie chameleon-like mimesis.
