‘My Tennis Maestro’ review: Pierfrancesco Favino charms as a faded Italian tennis pro

Dir: Andrea Di Stefano. Italy. 2025. 125mins

Having made four hard-boiled crime movies in both English (including his 2014 debut, Escobar: Paradise Lost) and Italian (2023 Berlin title The Last Night Of Amore), Italian director Andrea Di Stefano now serves up a tennis comedy set in the late 1980s. This tale of a teenage tennis star and his former-champion trainer is bouyed by a pair of sparkling performances, from Tiziano Menichelli and Pierfrancesco Favino respectively, that play out as one long match-point rally.

Bouyed by a pair of sparkling performances

It’s a smart move given Italy’s widespread tennis fever, as whipped up by current world number one Jannik Sinner. And actor Favino has become, in Italy at least, the starriest of A-listers and something of a national treasure. Elsewhere, My Tennis Maestro will provide an interesting test case. Italian comedies rarely fly well abroad, but this well-crafted charmer could prove to be an exception to the rule.

The period setting helps, as does the fact that the film’s saturated, Technicolor look and soundtrack of classic Italian pop by Loredana Berté, Patty Pravo and other dolce vita darlings drags us back from the ostensible late 1980s setting towards the 1960s. And just as Italian comedy classics like Dino Risi’s The Easy Life (1962) often put the emphasis on the ‘bitter’ of ‘bittersweet’, so do My Tennis Maestro. Not many sports films, outside of documentaries, are so interested in failure. The fine script gets away with this potential downer because it’s often very funny, and because it performs a switch and bait. By the end, we realise that the story isn’t really about sport at all; it’s about growing up.

In his third role, teenage actor Menichelli is excellent as Felice (which means ’happy’), a focused 13-year-old who we first meet as a talented regional tennis player. He is a wound spring – the winder being his dad-coach Pietro (an enjoyable Giovanni Ludeno), who keeps his son on a tight regime of early nights and endless training sessions. Pietro’s favourite tactic issolid baseline play: “volleys and net play are for rich kids”, he tells his dutiful son. But when Felice earns the right to progress to national level, dad reluctantly steps aside and invests all his savings in the coaching services of Favino’s Raul Gatti, a former pro who once “made it to the last 16 in the Italian Open”.

Now a wreck of a sportsman, fresh out of a long-stay clinic with a lithium carbonate prescription, Raul still knows a thing or two about tennis, and he can also turn on the charm with the ladies – a habit, we will discover, that has not always served him well in the past. It’s not just his new coach’s laid-back teaching style that wrong-foots his driven, sanctimonious new pupil, it’s also the fact that, for the first time, he is being tutored by a guy who doesn’t need him – Raul even dozes off during a match.

On court, Felice is so full of competitive fury and tension that he looks like he’d break in two if you touched him. Off-duty, he’s tongue-tied, awkward around girls, younger in manner than his 13 years. Raul stares at him, at times, as if he’s a Martian – but he also feels for the kid.

My Tennis Maestro is good on the humdrum minutiae of the junior sports circuit – the sad, out-of-season seaside hotels, the sheer amount of stuff that needs to be lugged about, the endless waiting around, the dusty trophy shelves, the nostalgic camaraderie between coaches remembering distant feats of their heroes or themselves. It is, in the end, just a little overlong, but not enough to dilute its charm.