Luca Guadagnino (Palermo, 1971) knew nothing about tennis before making this film, but he knew a lot about desire. Of his power to make life memorable and of the havoc that falling before him causes. That’s what ‘Melissa P.’ was about. (2005), also ‘Yo soy el amor’ (2009), ‘Cegados por el sol’ (2015) or ‘Call Me by Your Name’ (2017), for which she won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay and was nominated for Best film. Under his gaze, tennis becomes a mere excuse to dissect three characters full of layers and secrets, some confessable and others less so, and to explore the power dynamics that are established between them.
And like in any love triangle, everyone ends up hurt. “I think that movies are capable of transmitting depth when there is an intelligent infrastructure for it. In this case, there is brilliant engineering in the script about this match, which is the final of a tournament, in which two characters compete whose Their relationship is revealed over the previous 13 years. We see what has happened to them and the games they have played, both them and her, the other protagonist. So for me it wasn’t about tennis per se, but about it as a metaphor for complications and inevitable destinies.. Also about the awards and the many unexpected things that you can score in life when you have someone in front of you,” explains the director.
The meeting takes place in a London suite, the morning after the preview in this city where he went with Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist, the three main actors. Zendaya (‘Dune’, ‘Dune: Part Two’) plays a future tennis star whose career is cut short by injury. After this she becomes the fierce trainer of her husband, played by Faist (‘West Side Story’). She plays the third party in contention with O’Connor (‘The Crown’), former best friend of one and ex-boyfriend of another. “All of them, due to different fates in life, are as if repressed in their adult lives. And when repression is instilled in someone it ends up generating a struggle. In some way they feel that they have to tame that feeling of spark and freedom that when you are young You think it will last forever, and in reality it doesn’t. So the conflict has to do with redefining the meaning of the possible and the impossible. It is not a film about the inevitability of the end of youthful utopia, but the opposite. practice utopia, but we have to break the barriers and walls that we have built and launch ourselves into life.
This idea of the energy of youth, the end of innocence and emotionally intense characters is one of the hallmarks of the filmmaker. It doesn’t matter if we talk about ‘Call Me by Your Name’, with the discovery of the passion of a very young Timothée Chalamet, or ‘Bones and All’, where he himself made cannibalism a metaphor for this (and of many other things). Here the three characters also end up devouring each other. “What happens when you meet someone who is inevitable for you? It’s hard because it becomes something enormous for which you would be willing to pay a high price. It’s the price of salt, as Patricia Highsmith said”. The mention is not coincidental because once you have read the American author and seen Guadagnino’s films, you can establish undeniable connections in those dense characters full of ulterior motives under an appearance that is, yes, pristine.
A few years ago, after filming ‘Blinded by the Sun’, the filmmaker confessed that he did not want to specialize in films about rich and jaded people. Maybe that’s why he chained together ‘Suspiria’ and ‘Hasta los libros (Bones and All)’, recreating the viscosities of bodies and blood. But he’s back to his old ways with the wealthy. Everything in ‘Rivals’ is stylish and elegant, thanks largely to Jonathan Anderson, Loewe’s creative director responsible for costume design (in ‘Blinded by the Sun’ it was Raf Simons, then a Dior designer, who performed this task). “He is very intelligent, he has an enormous talent for understanding people’s behavior. He knows how to make characters understandable at a glance through their clothes. This is how the relationship between fashion and cinema works.”
Zendaya’s power
One of the surprises of this film (there are several) is seeing Zendaya playing an adult woman and mother of a girl for the first time in her career. In addition, the actress also acts as a producer and each of her appearances during the promotion has become an event orchestrated around her tennis-themed outfits. “She is an impressive star, one of those that you can’t take your eyes off of. Her performances allow you to see the experience of life. He is tremendously intelligent and has enormous ambition. Healthy ambition, wanting to know and understand the nuances of human behavior. It has been incredible to see her play with enormous maturity a character with an arc from 18 to her mid-thirties. When I saw the whole movie I realized I couldn’t take my eyes off it.”
old Europe
‘Rivals’ is the second film that Guadagnino has shot in the United States after ‘Bones and All’, where the Midwestern landscape served as another character. In this case, it is something more intangible. “I don’t think this could have been set in Old Europe. There is something about these characters that exudes self-sufficiency and breathes that invisible class system, but that could be within the reach of many, that has to do with the American dream. Furthermore, It shows a very performative world, and I am not just referring to the physical and sporting aspects, but to the staging of success, of having and possessing. There is a pop culture that is seen in the way they dress, eat or drink that to me is inherent to American culture. “I don’t know if it would have worked the same if we had talked about a tennis player in Switzerland.”.
The script is the work of playwright Justin Kuritzkes (for gossip: he is the husband of ‘Past Lives’ director Celine Song), who is also the screenwriter of Guadagnino’s next film, ‘Queer’, an adaptation of the novel by William S. Burroughs. with Daniel Craig. The Italian is going through a hyper-productive period with another feature film in the making, ‘Separate Rooms’ (with Josh O’Connor and Léa Seydoux), the BBC series about ‘Brideshead Revisited’ (with Cate Blanchett, Ralph Fiennes and Rooney Mara), an adaptation of ‘Lord of the Flies’ and the sequel to ‘Call Me by Your Name’. But it is impossible to get a single word out of any of these projects. “Now I just want to talk about ‘Rivals’,” he clarifies.
Laura is a film critic and cultural journalist. The first time she went to the movies she saw ‘ET the Extra-Terrestrial’, and she never forgets that. She has written about theater, music, art, photography, architecture and food in ‘Elle’ and ‘Harper’s Bazaar’. In ‘Fotogramas’ she specializes in what we could call ‘auteur cinema’, although she touches all genres.
He studied Journalism at the Complutense University of Madrid and specialized in the conflict in Northern Ireland at the Queen University of Belfast. Which led him to watch ‘Hidden Agenda’ (Ken Loach, 1990), ‘In the Name of the Father’ (Jim Sheridan, 1997), ‘Bloody Sunday’ (Paul Greengrass, 2002) and all the films that had to do with He will go.
He traveled to Cuba to study at the EICTV (International School of Cinema and Television) in San Antonio de los Baños, where he watched a lot of Latin American cinema and drank too many mojitos. He also filmed a documentary on the island full of wonderful characters. One of his first jobs was on the television channel ‘Cineclassics’, where he co-wrote the documentary ‘Cinema during the Spanish Civil War’.
He loves ‘Empire of the Sun’ (Steven Spielberg, 1987), ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992), ‘Thelma & Louise’ (Ridley Scott, 1992) and ‘The Age of Innocence’ (Martin Scorsese , 1993). But in general, he has a preference for small films that tell stories that no one would notice if they passed them on the street. He likes that cinema that lives beyond the margins of entertainment.
He has co-written the book ‘Cinema and Fashion’ (Ed. Pigmalion Edypro) and throughout his career he has interviewed performers and filmmakers such as Helen Mirren, Al Pacino, Jessica Chastain, Isabelle Huppert, Juliette Binoche, Julianne Moore, Hirokazu Koreeda, Sam Mendes, Jonathan Glazer, Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, Jude Law or Hugh Jackman.
