Final Set

Thomas was called a prodigy in his youth, and the career that was expected never came. He is thirty seven, his knee damaged by an old injury and his ranking low. He makes a decision anyway: to enter the qualifying rounds at Roland Garros. His wife is against it, and his mother still sees him through her own unfinished ambition. The training begins. Quentin Reynaud writes and directs. Alex Lutz plays Thomas, with Kristin Scott Thomas as his mother and Ana Girardot as his wife. What interests the film is not victory but that the time to stop has already passed. Thomas's body no longer carries him, and the narrative shows that physically in every scene: the strapping, the injections, the length of the warm ups. The matches are shot faithfully to the rhythm of tennis; the points run close to real time and the tension builds slowly. The mother is the hardest strand; she is the person who pushed him from childhood, and the relationship is never resolved. Alex Lutz is usually known as a comedian and the part here is in an entirely different register. Its limit is predictability; which points of the sports film shape it will follow is clear from the start. Who it is for: viewers who like sports drama and character driven French film. Who it is not for: the pace is slow, the match sections are long for anyone who does not know tennis, and the ending stays emotionally measured.