Pick of the week: Movies
Challengers
general release
For the first few minutes, you worry that this is going to be a superficial exercise in shiny retro: a Gen Z update of the Adrian Lyne formula film of the 1980s and ’90s. (9½ weeks, fatal Attraction, indecent Proposal, A numerical sexy saga, featuring some dazzling cinematography.
Then you remember that the director is Luca Guadagnino: the Italian auteur is responsible for I’m loving, call me by your name And bones and allWhose work is positively defined by its fascination with subtleties, transgressions, and what lies beneath the surface.
Challengers What begins as a standard story of two rising tennis players – best friends Art Donaldson (Mike Feist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor, who played Prince Charles in seasons 3 and 4. Crown) – Competing for the attention of young superstar Tashi Duncan (Zendaya).
Then things get dark. The action moves from the flaming trio’s first meeting in 2006 to 2019, as the two men – no longer friends – face each other in court.
In the intervening years, Tashi suffered from injuries, she married and coached Art (who achieved Grand Slam success), and she turned her back on former lover Patrick, who competed in fewer tournaments. Takes. But her interest in art, which she wants to retire, is waning.
Does she ever really get over the temperamental but charismatic Patrick? And whether Tani’s initial quip – that she doesn’t want to be a “home breaker” by setting two boys up against each other – is actually a joke, or a recognition that her lesbian feelings run deeper than her competitive desire for him. Are?
Justin Kuritzkes’ whip-smart dialogue sometimes echoes screwball comedy in its rapid pace. But this is a story of power, ambition and loyalty rather than doe-eyed love. There is a piece of ice embedded in its heart which makes it as coldly serious as it is unashamedly glamorous.
exhibition
Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and Blue Rider
Tate Modern, London, until 20 October
Brilliantly curated by Natalia Sidlina, this is not only the most ambitious UK exhibition of German Expressionist art for many years; It frees its subject from the narrow discussion of modernist aesthetics by presenting the story in terms of people, place, and ideas rather than abstract theory.
In Munich and the Bavarian village of Munchau, a group of notable artists created a movement that was as creatively dazzling as it was short-lived: the “Blue Reiter” or “Blue Rider” (the meaning of the name is still disputed). At its center were Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriel Münter; Partners in life as well as work; the salons of Russian-born painter Marianne von Werefkin; and a group of creative explorers including Franz Marc, Paul Klee, August Macke and Erma Bossi.
The Blue Rider group held two public exhibitions in Munich in 1911 and 1912 and issued a single ephemera before being disintegrated by World War I (Marc died at Verdun in 1916). Their light burned briefly but brightly.
Don’t miss your chance to see what they achieved; If you need more eye candy there will be more at Claudia Pritchard’s exhibition at the next TNE,
Book
Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World
by Dorian Lynskey
picador
Why are we so concerned about the imminence of the apocalypse? Part of the answer, writes Dorian Lynskey, is that such speculation is embedded in our social DNA (see the Book of Revelation for details). And then, of course, there is the evidence all around us: Covid, the climate emergency, the possibility of artificial intelligence replacing humanity, nuclear war back in the headlines.
But Linsky – whose last book, Ministry of Truth, one of the best articles ever written on George Orwell – is more interested in the culture of disaster, of which his command is prodigious. So he addresses Lord Byron’s poem Darkness (1816) and Mary Shelley’s the last man (1826) with as much energy and insight as James Cameron Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Emily St. John Mandel station eleven (2014) and of course, the works of JG Ballard.
The message he gets from these encyclopedic studies is extremely poignant: “We have to live in the space between ‘everything is going to be OK’ and ‘everything is messed up'”. true enough.
It’s a Rich and Remarkable Book – and You’ve Never Seen It white lotus Again in exactly the same light.
Cinema
there’s still tomorrow
Selected Cinemas
Paola Cortellesi’s directorial debut, in which she also played the overworked and downtrodden housewife Delia, performed better than both barbie And oppenheimer at the Italian box office last year. Set in Rome in 1946, the year Italian women were given the vote, it surprisingly begins when Delia’s abusive husband Ivano (Valerio Mastandrea), upon waking up, slaps her across the face.
The cast is uniformly excellent, particularly Romana Maggiora Vergano as Marcella, the teenage daughter for whom Delia wants a better future, and Giorgio Colangeli as her misogynistic father-in-law, who is bedridden but still commits sexual harassment.
Cortellasi’s film has attracted a lot of attention in Italy as that country grapples with the persistence of patriarchal violence and femicide, and deservedly so everywhere else.