Mark Reviews Movies: FINAL SET

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 26, 2021

If tennis was ever fun for Thomas J. Edison (Alex Lutz), it stopped being so decades ago. The protagonist of Final Set is a professional player, 37 years old, and looking to make a comeback, after twice having surgery on his right knee. Thomas has played tennis for most of his life, and when he entertains the idea of doing something else, the realization hits him: He has never had any other ambitions and possesses no other skills. This is it.

Writer/director Quentin Reynaud's movie presents this character and this situation with little insight beyond his obsession and with an increasing reliance on assorted clichés. The story hints at what has driven Thomas to this place in his life, in which tennis is both a passion and an overwhelming burden, but it doesn't dig deeply enough for us to see him as more than an obsessed figured or this story as more than a routine sports story.

With the initial support of his wife Eve (Ana Girardot), Thomas signs up for the qualification rounds of the French Open. The matches proceed with highlights from each round (The way Reynaud frames much of the action from behind the protagonist does provide a kinetic sense of the action), and Thomas starts winning. Meanwhile, Eve, a former tennis player who gave up the sport after the birth of the couple's son, starts to resent Thomas' absence and maybe even his success. His suggestion that, no matter what happens, this might not be the end of his career makes matters worse.

Most of this is fairly generic, and the element that could give us a better understanding of Thomas continuing to play is mostly ignored. That's his relationship with his mother Judith (Kristin Scott Thomas), a tennis trainer who pushed her son since he could use a racket but abandoned him after a heartbreaking loss.

Instead, Reynaud uses the domestic melodrama and this vague outline of Thomas' character to bring this story to a Big Game, against a younger rising star. It's clear from how much we see of that final match, as well as the majority of the sequence being given the flat look of a television broadcast, that Reynaud is counting on the audience having a personal investment in Thomas' success—or something else. Final Set skimps on too much for that to be the case.

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