and directed by Luca Guadigno.
I honestly don’t know what this movie was about. It’s about a 3 way relationship (2 boys and a girl) who meet… somewhere… a dorm of some kind or maybe it’s a tennis camp for teens. The 2 guys met at 12 at a tennis camp and they’ve been best friends forever.
Early on, Zendaya asks them if they’ve ever… you know. And they vehemently deny it. But then they admit to one teaching the other to jerk off and to think about girls when doing it. Later she initiates a 3 way kiss and pulls away to watch the two guys make out with each other. So that’s the whole homoerotic thing. In Call Me By Your Name, Armie Hammer knows he’s homosexual and Timothe Chalomet seems to change, but is pretty gay by the end of it. But for Hammer, (and you can see this if you look closely), his inner turmoil is their age difference. Elio is under age and Hammer is in college. In this, these two guys don’t question the fact that they’re making out, but they also have no inner feelings about being gay or bisexual and go on to lead mostly heterosexual lives. But anyway, the movie builds up this tennis match between the 2 at the age of 40. And at the end of the movie it goes on for so long and there is so much slow motion, I had trouble staying awake. Presumably we’re waiting to see who wins the tie break. But instead, because of an awkward attempt to stop an overhead lob, Josh O’Connor falls over the net and into Mike Faist’s waiting arms, and they hug each other. The End.
Yes, I was that confused. And as well as Zendaya has been doing — she’s currently the lead and the 2nd lead in two movies at the same time: Dune and this one — she’s utterly unbelievable as a tennis coach and even more unbelievable as a tennis player. Not well cast. I didn’t believe her as a mom either.
But since having thought more about this and at least one other movie Luca Guadigno has made, I tend to think that the fact that these characters have no problems with their sexualities indicates a rather superficial approach, especially in this movie when the two of them were thrown into a gay panic when Zendaya asks if they’ve ever… (had sex), and then suddenly kiss each other like there’s no woman in the room. I found it sort of fascinating in Call Me By Your Name, except there, until Armie Hammer’s arrival, Timothe Chalomet had been dating and fucking a girl. I don’t know what the actors do to make that leap, but it’s not in the writing.