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‘an impossible love’ (‘un amour impossible’): film review.

Virginie Efira ('Elle') and Niels Schneider ('Polina') headline 'An Impossible Love,' Catherine Corsini’s adaptation of the best-selling novel by Christine Angot.

By Jordan Mintzer

Jordan Mintzer

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French writer Christine Angot is well-known in her homeland for a series of autobiographical books (including L’Inceste , Pourquoi le Bresil? and Rendez-vous ) that chronicle the abuse she suffered as a child and the life she’s built in the wake of trauma. Filled with searingly honest accounts of her relationships, sexual experiences and psychological states past and present, Angot’s emotionally puissant first-person confessions return time and again to the disturbing events of her youth, reflecting on how they have shaped her evolution as an author and woman.

(In France, Angot is also a highly mediatized public intellectual who has made several controversial television appearances over the course of her career. Film lovers got a taste of her piercing prose last year in the script she co-wrote for Claire Denis’ anti-romantic comedy Let the Sunshine In .)

The Bottom Line An intimate, well-played if overstretched family saga.

In An Impossible Love ( Un amour impossible ), which was adapted from Angot’s 2015 best-seller of the same title, director Catherine Corsini depicts the writer’s tumultuous childhood through the point of view of her mother, Rachel — beautifully played by Belgian star Virginie Efira ( Victoria , Elle and Paul Verhoeven’s upcoming Benedetta ).

Beginning in 1960 and running all the way to the year 2000, we follow small-town gal Rachel as she falls head over heels for a seductive Parisian translator, Philippe (Niels Schneider), and then spends the rest of her life trying to make something of their on-and-off (mostly off) affair, which leaves her pregnant and, eventually, a single mother struggling to get by.

Yet despite the hardships she faces, the brave, resourceful Rachel manages to build a decent home for herself and daughter, Chantal (played by four different actresses to cover each decade), who grows up to be a smart and precocious young woman. And then Philippe comes back into the picture, leading to disastrous consequences.

Critics' Notebook: A Tough Year for France, Reflected Onscreen

Corsini directs in a fluid manner that highlights the simple beauty of the countryside — a style already evident in her 2015 lesbian romance, Summertime — with DP Jeanne Lapoirie ( BPM ) returning to provide a warm color palette and production designer Toma Baqueni ( Ismael’s Ghosts ) keeping the decors modest yet welcoming, whether it’s Rachel’s country home or the public housing flat they move to later on. By contrast, the few glimpses we get of Philippe’s world are cold and uninviting, especially the Parisian offices where Rachel asks his dismissive father for support.

Released locally after bypassing the fest circuit, An Impossible Love has less box-office potential than Summertime , which grossed nearly $4 million worldwide. Still, it gives overseas audiences the chance to sample Angot’s writing, which has been popular in France for two decades and deserves to be discovered abroad — even if it winds up overshadowing a movie that both does the author justice and sticks too close to the page.

Production companies: Chaz Productions, France 3 Cinema, Artemis Productions, Le Pacte Voo & BETV, RTBF, Shelter Prod Cast: Virginie Efira, Niels Schneider, Jehnny Beth, Estelle Lescure, Ambre Hasaj, Sasha Allessandri-Torres Garcia Director: Catherine Corsini Screenwriters: Catherine Corsini, Laurette Polmanss, based on the novel by Christine Angot Producer: Elisabeth Perez Director of photography: Jeanne Lapoirie Production designer: Toma Baqueni Costume designer: Virginie Montel Editor: Frederic Baillehaiche Composer: Gregoire Hetzel Casting director: Sarah Teper Sales: Le Pacte

In French 135 minutes

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Virginie Efira and Niels Schneider in An Impossible Love.

An Impossible Love review – a mother and daughter driven apart

A toxic narcissist invades the lives of two women in Catherine Corsini’s intimate study

W riter and director Catherine Corsini tends to be unfairly overlooked in appraisals of contemporary French cinema. I very much enjoyed her last film, Summertime, a swooning lesbian romance sharpened by a flinty 1970s feminist backdrop. But I am not convinced that An Impossible Love is the film that will elevate her status within the arthouse community. Not that it’s bad – on the contrary, this adaptation of a novel by Christine Angot is an intimate and sensitively observed study of a mother-daughter relationship. But it is also one of the more muted films of Corsini’s career, a picture that quilts its fierce political heart with a woolly layer of female martyrdom.

Rachel (Virginie Efira, who plays the character from her mid-20s to her 70s) is enthralled when she meets Philippe (Niels Schneider), a sophisticated Parisian who quotes Nietzsche and drops offhand snips into conversation about her Jewish heritage. The toxic narcissist klaxon is sounding from early on in the relationship, possibly from the moment that Philippe gives her a required reading list.

Rachel has his baby – a daughter, Chantal – but Philippe breezily wafts away any suggestion he should acknowledge the child as his. Even so, his malignant presence spreads into the lives of both Rachel and Chantal, tainting the bond between them. The class and dignity that Rachel displays are the very things Philippe claims she lacks; the reasons she is unfit to be his wife. And since Philippe deserves to be fois gras-ed to death by being force-fed his own horrid Gauloises and leather-bound philosophy tomes, Rachel’s restraint, while admirable, does little to quash audience outrage on her behalf.

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An Impossible Love Reviews

Un amour impossible is a tough watch, but oh, what a beautiful film. The period costumes are not only gorgeous but the textures are rendered with such precision you feel like you could reach out and touch them.

Full Review | Jan 13, 2020

The movie is too conventional for its own good, even though the love triangle that it portrays is full of sharp edges that harm. [Full Review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 16, 2019

The way in which Virginie Efira holds the erosion of time on the screen becomes the great reservoir of genius under the braid of unfortunate narrative decisions. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Jul 16, 2019

The choice of [actors] Virginie Efira and, above all, Niels Schneider cannot be more accurate.... However, the film lacks the incontestable force of the novel. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 8, 2019

Corsini has not only made his best film, but also the most risky in order to offer a look at the past and the present and the complicated ties that define that union. [Full Review in Spanish]

Full Review | Jun 14, 2019

The twists and turns of the plot... are sustained more in the expressions of the protagonists than in their dialogues. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Jun 13, 2019

The performances in the film allow for a proper dissection and look at feminine intimacy. [Full Review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jun 12, 2019

An Impossible Love is a film that gains potency thanks to the dramatic tension that flows, envelopes you and surprises you. [Full Review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jun 12, 2019

... a love story... slowly revealing a bleakness underneath the picturesque French scenery and fashion.

Full Review | Original Score: 15/20 | Mar 4, 2019

The movie is plausible, tender and vibrant. Efira is excellent as a woman who habitually suffers in silence.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 24, 2019

Corsini's ending is refreshing precisely because it understands that finding sustainable ways to live in the wake of trauma aren't neatly cinched by vengeance.

Full Review | Jan 24, 2019

One of the more muted films of Corsini's career, a picture that quilts its fierce political heart with a woolly layer of female martyrdom.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 6, 2019

An unbearably sad film dotted with brief glissando-like moments of sweet, sunny reprieve.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 4, 2019

There are incidental efforts to offer social-historical comment on France in turbulent times. But it is the characterisation that really holds the attention.

It later takes a decidedly darker turn...but the emotional power is consistently undercut by the sense that we, as an audience, are being roundly manipulated.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 4, 2019

An Impossible Love is a modern take on melodrama, full of strong moments, approachable storytelling and anchored by a terrific turn from Efira wrapped up in a stinging rebuke of class rejection.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 3, 2019

Corsini is a film-maker who has always been drawn to the themes of female sexuality and the challenge and transgression that it represents. This is her best picture so far.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 3, 2019

A subtle, harrowing, acid-etched story of love and hate...

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 2, 2019

Virginie Efira anchors this imperfect film with her earthy beauty and compelling emotional honesty.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 28, 2018

An intimate, well-played if overstretched family saga.

Full Review | Nov 13, 2018

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An Impossible Love review - toxic romance across the years | reviews, news & interviews

An impossible love review - toxic romance across the years, french drama charts the intolerable relationship of author's parents.

This is a love that begins sweetly, turns terrible, and is told with unflinching directness. Directed by Catherine Corsini, An Impossible Love is based on a novel by Christine Angot (known in France , and increasingly elsewhere, for her powerful autobiographical fiction), which is in turn based on Angot’s own troubling early life and family experiences. If the film is too direct – an anti-melodrama melodrama – it is only because it is honest and treats emotional extremes with great fidelity.

It all begins with romance, as Rachel (Virginie Efira) – working class, Jewish and beautiful – meets the cultured Philippe (Niels Schneider) in their office canteen. Rachel, ashamed at the failure of a previous engagement, is attracted to Philippe’s confidence and experience. He is a traveller and connoisseur who eats oysters and reads Nietzsche. The way in which details about Philippe are revealed, and the early hints of how he treats women – he tells Rachel off for using certain phrases that could “handicap her socially” – put a sinister shade behind his charm. The film goes on to explore how impossibly dark those shades can become.

Philippe defines the terms of their love by asserting three kinds of relationship: marital love, passionate love, and the inevitable encounter. His romance with Rachel falls, for him, into the last category, giving it a spontaneity that allows him to justify inexcusable behaviour. Because their romance exists beyond the conventional social order, so can his acts. For him, any wrongdoing was simply bound to happen. He was never going to marry Rachel, he says, or acknowledge the child, Chantal, that he fathers with her. Wasn’t Rachel to know this? The film is narrated by Chantal as an adult looking back on the story of her parents. This creates a mood of loss and contributes to the sense that everything that happened was fated.

Witnessing Rachel’s stoicism in the face of appalling mistreatment is both unbearable and unbelievable. Philippe returns to her life at intervals as Rachel and Chantal live and grow together. Philippe is the same casually domineering patriarch every time. Rachel’s humility – which is a kind of sweet affliction she cannot abolish – prevents her from demanding more support from Philippe. All she can ask for is that he acknowledges Chantal legally as his own. But Rachel clearly mourns the lack of a normal father for her daughter, just as Chantal criticises Rachel for trying to call them a “family”. What develops from this conundrum is the most heartbreaking relationship: the unclassifiable love between distant father and impressionable daughter.

An Impossible Love is an unbearably sad film dotted with brief glissando-like moments of sweet, sunny reprieve. A more constant joy in the film are the power of the performances, particularly that of Estelle Lescure as the adolescent Chantal, and of course Virginie Efira as Rachel. The love between these two characters – or the female experience of love, more broadly – is where Corsini’s eye is most acutely focused, and she takes us there with candour, integrity and overwhelming emotion.

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'An Impossible Love': London Review

By Jonathan Romney 2018-10-19T07:00:00+01:00

No comments

A superior yet highly successful melodrama from Catherine Corsini.

Dir. Catherine Corsini. France. 2018. 135 mins.

The love at stake in Catherine Corsini’s new drama isn’t so much impossible as barely thinkable – and yet the story it tells is apparently a true one. Set over several decades, this account of a passionate romance and the profoundly dysfunctional family relationships it trails in its wake is based on a 2015 novel by French writer Christine Angot – which is to say that, like most of her work, it is based on Angot’s own personal history.

This is the most accomplished and ambitious film to date from a director who has frequently explored female themes from a committed gender-politics perspective

Anyone familiar with the substantial fictional-slash-autobiographical output of Angot – who recently co-wrote Claire Denis’s Let the Sunshine In - will know that one very dark theme tends to run consistently through it, and so will have an inkling early on of where An Impossible Love is heading.

That Angot is considerably less known to readers outside France – where she’s a controversial figure both as writer and TV personality – shouldn’t stop Corsini’s film from connecting with mature, upmarket, predominantly female audiences, notably in the UK, where the film is due for release through Curzon Artificial Eye in January. That its lead Virginie Efira isn’t a major name internationally shouldn’t matter either. She offers a powerful, assured performance in a film that’s likely to score highly both as a superior and very accessible melodrama and as an intelligent conversation piece (it played, appropriately, in the Debate strand of the London Film Festival).

The film begins in 1958 in Châteauroux in central France, where 25-year-old Rachel (Efira) works as a typist. She clicks with a handsome young man she meets in the office canteen, Philippe (Niels Schneider), a romantic young intellectual from a wealthy family, fond of quoting Nietzsche. The couple begins a passionate relationship, and Rachel eventually gives birth to a daughter, Chantal (played as a teenager by impressive newcomer Estelle Lescure). But Philippe refuses to marry Rachel, or to allow his daughter to bear his family name.

Over the years that follow, it would be a severe understatement to say that he plays fast and loose, elusive and manipulative with Rachel. Even so, Rachel remains in love with him, while building a career and raising her daughter alone – a feat requiring real determination and strength of character in France in the 60s and 70s especially. It’s when Chantal is a little older, and starts growing closer to the father she’s barely known that Philippe’s character starts to reveal an even darker side.

This is the most accomplished and ambitious film to date from a director who has frequently explored female themes from a committed gender-politics perspective, but also employing an approachable mainstream art-house aesthetic (Kristin Scott Thomas vehicle Leaving; lesbian romance Summertime) . Here she follows the travails of Rachel over decades with a keen historical eye, and with a sense of period detail that echoes the bold canvases of Diane Kurys’s female-centred dramas of the 80s and 90s ( At First Sight , C’est la Vie ), with Toma Bacqueni’s production design helping immerse us in the everyday France of several decades.

The acting is terrific. Lead Efira, previously known for lighter material ( In Bed With Victoria ), shows herself more than capable of a heavyweight dramatic role, subtly maturing from romantic 20s to careworn middle age, while Schneider is unsettling as the mercurial male who exploits his seductive, narcissistic charm to baleful effect. It’s the elusive interplay between the two that allows us to believe in a situation whereby a seemingly self-possessed woman would allow herself to become the long-term victim of a man whose abusive character is way off the scale.

Lescure makes a brittle, troubling debut, and an extra asset is the final-reel appearance by Jehnny Beth – singer of rock band Savages, and previously a screen actor under her original name Camille Berthomier – as the adult Chantal, who has a distinct resemblance to Angot, together with her spikily pragmatic take on the world.

Production company: Chaz Productions

International sales: Le Pacte, [email protected]

Producer: Elizabeth Perez

Screenplay: Catherine Corsini, Laurette Polmanns, adapted from the novel by Christine Angot

Cinematography: Jeanne Lapoirie

Editor: Frédéric Baillehaiche

Production design: Toma Bacqueni

Music: Grégoire Hetzel

Main cast: Virginie Efira, Niels Schneider, Jehnny Beth, Estelle Lescure

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An Impossible Love Review

04 Jan 2019

An Impossible Love

Catherine Corsini’s An Impossible Love is an old school melodrama without the histrionics and played for real. It’s conventional and mostly devoid of compelling narrative incidents but it casts a charming, entertaining spell as Corsini puts together a handsome looking, well played tale of relationships — both romantic and familial — across forty years while skilfully avoiding dodgy ageing make up.

For the first 40 minutes or so An Impossible Love engagingly etches the relationship between Jewish office worker Rachel and worldly translator Philippe, a patiently built, affair marked by frank sex scenes, walks in the country and Philippe’s off beam views ("A woman remains barely feminine in trousers"). Yet it soon becomes clear that there is a gulf in class status and, when she falls pregnant, he not only rejects marriage ("Of course if you were rich I’d consider it") but won’t give the new born baby his surname.

It’s at this point, Corsini’s film switches from the impossible love between men and women to the impossible love between mother and daughter, examining parent-child relations over the next 30 years with a strong feel for the mini dramas in everyday interactions. It’s a state of affairs complicated by Phillipe’s return to Rachel and Chantal’s life. Her father starts feeding the knowledge hungry Chantal (played as an adolescent by Estelle Lecure) with culture and travel, forcing Rachel to re-evaluate her own contribution to daughter’s current growth.

The film is based on a best selling novel by Christine Angot, a French writer known for her confessional accounts of her own traumatic upbringing, and she channels some of that in a third act shock, tactfully handled by Corsini. Throughout, the director is well served by her two leads. Neils Schneider makes for a charismatic outsider, initially sincere in his ardour for Rachel before bringing believably colder notes when he realizes his girlfriend doesn’t chime with his upbringing.

But the star here is Efira, who makes the journey from lovestruck girlfriend to stoic single mother believable and affecting. A scene she shares with grown up Chantal (played by Beth, front woman of the postpunk group Savages) that puts Rachel’s lifelong relationship to rights is a cracker. It’s a big moment in a small but quietly effective film.

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An Impossible Love

Review by Sophie Monks Kaufman @sopharsogood

Directed by

Catherine Corsini

Jehnny Beth Niels Schneider Virginie Efira

Anticipation.

All the right people have been hyping this title.

A romantic drama that becomes a social commentary that takes on an impossible scope.

In Retrospect.

Virginie Efira, Catherine Corsini and Christine Angot is a potent brew.

Catherine Corsini adapts Christine Angot to captivating effect in this Châteauroux-set romantic drama.

C atherine Corsini’s An Impossible Love , adapted from Christine Angot’s novel, is a Trojan Horse of a movie. On the surface it is a sensual romance: there are sweeping flurries of piano music care of Grégoire Hetzel; idyllic, sun-kissed landscapes are captured by cinematographer Jeanne Lapoirie; and a soft, feminine voiceover is supplied by Jehnny Beth.

Yet the film’s essential framework shows how trauma is passed on from generation to generation – specifically, from mother to daughter – and how the patriarchy enables abuses of power to occur without consequence. Underneath all that is an ironclad monument to female resilience: women endure as experience forces our eyes to open.

Châteauroux (where Angot was born) is the location where working class Rachel (Virginie Efira) lives and meets the bourgeois, worldly Philippe (Niels Schneider). They rapidly embark on a very sexy relationship. “Your skin is like silk,” he says with awe, kissing every inch of her body. “You could have any man.” She smiles like the proverbial cat that got the cream: “It’s you I want to charm.” Rachel’s cousin is soon to be married and she thinks that Philippe will pop the question too.

A swooning, frenzied tone builds the momentum of a classic screen romance. A narration by Rachel and Phillipe’s child lends a sense of inevitability to this affair blossoming into something beautiful. Blissful waves of amour and pleasure-flushed faces propel the narrative, until Philippe, so far a perfect archetype of a Romantic Hero, begins to transgress this mould.

Schneider, all insouciant golden beauty, is often cast as a rascal, so seeing him cast as an earnest lover is a big surprise. He is perfectly awful – or awfully perfect – especially as Philippe’s true colours begin to show. He delivers devastating disappointments as if they are mere common sense. For her part, Efira reacts to blow after blow with surface composure, and then she carries on.

The child narrator, Chantal, is born. Years pass. Sometimes Rachel and Philippe see each other. More often they don’t. Rachel builds a good life. “My mother had no regrets. She had known grand passion and now I was there.” The sweep of the story is novelistic. Yet by subverting the predictable trajectory early on, Corsini (via Angot) maintains a sense of suspense while Efira holds attention with a performance of stoic beauty.

Her thoughtful nature is shown by the way she listens attentively to the people in her life. One motif is the two-way power struggle that takes place between her and Philippe. As Chantal grows up, this power struggle takes on a further dimension.

Then comes a twist that casts the power dynamics between the genders in a more desperate light. As with all the events in An Impossible Love, it unfolds naturalistically, without signposting, and big drama does not follow. However, everything that came before is recalibrated. The stakes retroactively heighten. A romantic drama becomes a biting social commentary. And still the film continues with a new existential ambience conjured by disillusionment, power, survival, what atrophies and what endures.

Published 3 Jan 2019

Tags: Catherine Corsini

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Little White Lies was established in 2005 as a bi-monthly print magazine committed to championing great movies and the talented people who make them. Combining cutting-edge design, illustration and journalism, we’ve been described as being “at the vanguard of the independent publishing movement.” Our reviews feature a unique tripartite ranking system that captures the different aspects of the movie-going experience. We believe in Truth & Movies.

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An Impossible Love

Engrossing and sweeping melodrama of infinitesimal detail..

@ Filmhouse, Edinburgh from Fri 15 Mar 2019

“My story is a familiar one,” trills a chanteuse at a dance attended by Rachel ( Virginie Efira ) in a small French town in the late ’50s. At first, this does seem to be the case as she circles the dance floor in the embrace of Philippe ( Niels Schneider ). An Impossible Love is more than an ordinary relationship drama, however. Rachel’s story encompasses five decades and not only the initial bloom of romantic love but that of a mother and daughter. It’s an engrossing and panoramic melodrama that isn’t afraid to go to the darkest places.

Philippe is initially charming and sweeps the beautiful and naive Rachel off her feet. Yet it’s not long before he’s waving more red flags than the Pamplona Bull Run. He delights in displaying his culture and erudition and, by implication, his higher social status. He hands her Nietzsche to read (which is never a positive signal in movies) and is casually anti-Semitic even though she has Jewish heritage. Worst of all, when Rachel reveals she is pregnant, he refuses to acknowledge the baby and abruptly ends their connection. The bulk of the film sees Rachel raise her daughter Chantal with Philippe appearing in their lives once in a blue moon, like a malignant human Brigadoon .

Efira is brilliant as Rachel, one of the most rounded and believable heroines of recent year. Her transition from lovestruck ingenue to loving and stoic mother is beautifully handled. Rachel’s relationship with Chantal ( Estelle Lescure plays her as an adolescent) is the film’s true emotional foundation and the ‘impossible love’ of the title. The most successful element is Rachel’s conflict as Philippe finally acknowledges Chantal. This should be a victory, yet she can see him manipulating the awestruck girl using the same methods that seduced her.

Schneider has a difficult role that he handles well. Philippe is a repellant character, yet it has to be plausible that women be drawn to him and to keep letting him back into their lives. Schneider has the same glowering Gallic attraction of a Romain Duris or Louis Garrel , appearing playful and predatory at the same time which partly explains the appeal. It is Efira however that has to convince with unfathomable motives for her continued connection with this man, and you can always empathise with, if not always understand, her decisions.

Although it occasionally lapses into languid periods of narrative inertia, it’s the relatively low-key approach to melodrama that anchors An Impossible Love in a recognisable reality. Love and pain are worn on the faces of its characters. Resolution is tentative and cautious. This is best exemplified in the gentle reconciliation between the aged Rachel and adult Chantal (affectingly played by Savages frontwoman Jehnny Beth ) after the toxic breach ripped through their relationship by the pungent narcissism of Philippe. This is arthouse at its most accessible and as such it may fall awkwardly between two potential audiences. This would be a pity as the impressive Corsini has delivered a mature, sensitive drama with a delicate touch.

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An impossible love.

2018 ‘Un amour impossible’ Directed by Catherine Corsini

A chronicle of the unconditional love between a mother and her daughter, from 1958 to the present day, which is endangered by an unsteady and manipulative father.

Virginie Efira Niels Schneider Jehnny Beth Estelle Lescure Coralie Russier Iliana Zabeth Catherine Morlot Ambre Hasaj Sasha Alessandri-Torrès Garcia Pierre Salvadori Gaël Kamilindi Simon Bakhouche Didier Sandre Simon Poulain Siegrid Alnoy Lionel Robert Mounia Raoui Arthur Igual Jean-Christophe Brétignière Régis Romele Mélina Garcia Norah Fradet Lola Alzieu Inès Mitanchet Cassandre Masurel Gotchaux Anaïs Bar Iris Oyabayo-Chapron Gina de Sordi Maya Colombani Show All… Caloé Pascal Tantot Caroline Borderieux Virginie Kotlinski Hamid Chbiki Françoise Anselmi Brunelle Clergerie

Director Director

Catherine Corsini

Producers Producers

Jean Labadie Patrick Quinet Elisabeth Perez Philippe Logie Serge Hayat Anne-Laure Labadie

Writers Writers

Catherine Corsini Laurette Polmanss

Original Writer Original Writer

Christine Angot

Casting Casting

Sarah Teper Cécile Mille

Editor Editor

Frédéric Baillehaiche

Cinematography Cinematography

Jeanne Lapoirie

Assistant Director Asst. Director

Xiaomi Thomas

Production Design Production Design

Toma Baqueni

Art Direction Art Direction

Thomas Salabert

Stunts Stunts

Eric Tatin Gérard Kuhnl Laurent Mulot

Composer Composer

Grégoire Hetzel

Sound Sound

Benoît Hillebrant Christophe Vingtrinier Lucien Richardson

Costume Design Costume Design

Virginie Montel

Artémis Productions Le Pacte CHAZ Productions France 3 Cinéma

Belgium France

Releases by Date

26 aug 2018, 12 oct 2018, 27 jan 2019, 04 may 2019, 07 nov 2018, 04 jan 2019, 23 mar 2019, 16 may 2019, 12 jul 2019, 22 aug 2019, 28 jul 2022, 10 oct 2019, 01 apr 2019, 11 oct 2023, releases by country.

Digital 14 VOD
Premiere Festival du Film Francophone d'Angoulême
Theatrical U
Theatrical III 電影節

South Korea

Premiere Jeonju International Film Festival
Theatrical 18
Premiere Göteborg Film Festival
Premiere London Film Festival

135 mins More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

Popular reviews

Review by Sarah ★★★★★

First 15 minutes: wow Virginie Efira is one of the most beautiful human beings alive

Last 30 minutes: I would literally like to light a man on fire and watch him burn

Review by Vishnu Sivakumar ★★★★ 1

If a dude mentions Nietzsche on the first date; run.

Review by DNA cinephile🏳️‍🌈 ★★★★

An Impossible Love. 2018. Directed by Catherine Corsini.

Catherine Corsini’s An Impossible Love (2018) is a tragic story that is so powerful an needed to be told on the big screen. Based on the book by Christine Angot, An Impossible Love, is propelled by the acting superiority of Virginie Efira and Niels Schneider. Although they are married in real life, it is difficult to think of them as a couple due to the devilish, criminal character that Schneider portrays: Philippe. In our opinion, An Impossible Love is a film that should be viewed due the exposure of crimes that go unpunished and unseen. This is a powerful memoir of pain and ramifications of lack of birth control and abortion rights.…

Review by Dan ★★★★★ 8

Sigh....Love. Why do we even love someone if we can't marry them? Why do we easily fall for a manipulative, abusive men? And, more importantly, why bring a child into this world if still you both don't get married? Consider being in the child's perspective, bearing the label "father unknown" on her birth certificate. Furthermore, consider as well the stress of being in the family's position that consist solely of a mother and daughter only.

This movie tackles these critical questions impressively that we never knew we needed. Watching it, one might realize how love can blind us, obscuring our ability to distinguish right from wrong. Love becomes the sole focus in our crush's eyes, leading us to overlook their…

Review by hanni97 ★★★★★

This show is the epitome of the saying "Men are trash"

Review by Allison M. 🌱 ★★★

An Impossible Love features Virginie Efira and Niels Schneider: Rachel and Philippe, a couple in love. Based on a novel by Christine Angot, this story really pushes the limits of tolerance. I found the 1950s set design to be a little bit sparse and the costumes to be better. Catherine Corsini is a master, though, as we saw from La Belle saison/Summertime and La Repetition/Replay . The movie continues through the 1960s and 1970s. I found whatever problems I had with the set design to be resolved by the 1970s; Corsini’s Summertime was really a perfect movie and also takes place during the 1970s.

It continues through the present day and works through tensions between characters and reveals family secrets. Well,…

Review by Maria Mariana ★★★★½

when he mentioned nietzsche I already knew this was going downhill

Review by Peter ★★★★

Virginie Efira has been my cinema obsession for 2 years now so when a movie of hers that I haven’t seen yet becomes available I’m very excited so expectations were high . This was a rough watch because initially I had no idea that the love interest of Rachel was going to be such a fuckin cunt and to watch him get worse and worse until he does the single most worst thing a man could do was a tough journey . At times it was frustrating because so many times you wanted Rachel to tell this guy to fuck off and just move on with your life . In saying that superb performances by Efira and Schneider and the…

Review by Rodrigo Homsi ★★★★

Escrito, produzido e dirigido por mulheres, o filme ainda conta com a sempre incrível atuação de Virginie Efira. Um filme atinge o seu objetivo toda vez que consegue arrancar exclamações e xingamentos ao assistí-lo, e esse aqui foi como assistir ao seu time sendo goleado no estádio. "Inacreditável" usei muito essa. "Ahh VTNC" escapou muito também. "Minha Nossa Senhora" e pra acalmar lembrava que era um filme de época. "VSF" era vírgula "Mas que FDP" define muito bem o personagem de Niels Schneider. Os dois protagonistas são um casal na vida real, isso explica as cenas quentes de intimidade em cena. O roteiro tira o espectador da zona de conforto e não melhora conforme os anos vão passando.

Review by stephanie ★★★★½

the amount of red flags in anything philippe says to rachel... should've seen it coming. so painful, yet beautifully shot by jeanne lapoirie. nothing like some cathartic crying to end 2021, thank you catherine corsini.

Review by mavi ★★★½

why does a beautiful woman cry over a trash and ugly man? I hate it here. virginie efira deserves better!

Review by Sarah ★★★★½ 1

Catherine Corsini how are you so good at this

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An Impossible Love

Release date

4 th January 2019

Adapted from the novel by Christine Angot and co-written and directed by Catherine Corsini, An Impossible Love chronicles the 50-year relationship between Rachel (Virginie Efira), a vibrant young woman from a working-class family, and Philippe (Niels Schneider), an eccentric and charismatic man from a wealthy family who disappears after Rachel becomes pregnant. With the father appearing only periodically to see their daughter Chantel, the film paints a complex portrait of the evolving relationships between each family member. Whilst the narrative is elegantly spun to cover such a long time period, often events can become bogged down in their own melodramatics, and with a massive runtime of 135 minutes, the final stretch of this familial odyssey is pure tedium.

The greatest strength of Corsini’s drama is in the strong performances by both Efira and Schneider, with the former being a particular highlight. Schneider is able to exude a screen presence that manages to walk the line between alluring and repulsive throughout, whereas Efira effectively demonstrates a wide emotional range that colours the various stages of her life and relationships that form the foundation of the film. Moreover, Estelle Lescure, who plays a teenage Chanel, gives an equally strong performance, with her section being the most enjoyable.

The narrative itself is presented in an understated but elegantly simplistic way. A voiceover from Chantel helps to establish the timeline of events with a personal connection, whilst the cinematography is pleasing without becoming the main attraction. The real challenge of the film is capturing half a century of life within the space of just over two hours. For the most part, what’s being focused on lends itself well to the overall drama, but large and constant time jumps (particularly towards the end) make it seem as if the movie is getting bored of itself and skipping to the end for us. Likewise, many smaller moments are of little consequence and bloat an already long runtime. Cutting 20 minutes from these sequences could have made for a more focused narrative and perhaps would have made the journey to the finish line more bearable.

Although it suffers from an overly padded runtime and occasionally stumbles on its own melodrama, An Impossible Love is nonetheless an intriguing and well-made feature that has a lot for audiences to love. It is practically impossible to hate this film.

Andrew Murray

An Impossible Love is released in select cinemas on 4 th January 2019.

Watch the trailer for An Impossible Love here:

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An Impossible Love: Dark family drama where terrible things happen

Review: viewers who know christine angot's novels and public persona will know the story.

Impossible Love

Early on in a French drama whose lovely wide-screen photography and elegant performances do little to prepare us for coming darkness, Rachel (Virginie Efira) meets Philippe (Niels Schneider), a young self-indentifying intellectual, in the work canteen.

It is the 1950s. He begins telling her about Friedrich Nietzsche. He can't decide whether to lend her a copy of Beyond Good and Evil or Thus Spoke Zarathustra . Oh God.

It’s that guy! It’s the guy who, 60 years later, insists upon following women around with Jordan Peterson books.

Anyway, Rachel falls for the chap – despite iffy remarks about her Jewish background – and they begin a very French, very sweaty relationship. Rachel eventually has Philippe’s daughter, Chantal, but he makes it clear that he has no interest in settling down. They split. Chantal grows. Rachel gets a job in a mental institution and, a decade or so later, the couple are reunited.

Viewers familiar with the semi-autobiographical novels (and the public persona) of Christine Angot will have some idea where the story is going and will grasp ambiguities in the title, but, narrated by Chantal in versions of the author’s prose, this difficult saga spanning many decades will still exert a grip. There is something of a soap opera about it.

There are incidental efforts to offer social-historical comment on France in turbulent times. But it is the characterisation that really holds the attention.

Following on from Leaving , a drama with Kristin Scott Thomas, and Summertime , an admirable lesbian romance with Cécile de France, director Catherine Corsini draws a long-suffering performance from Efira and a layered, properly infuriating one from Schneider.

Some very terrible things happen, but she never allows the picture so slip into melodrama. We don’t always understand why people do the things they do, but we don’t doubt that they would do those things.

Recommended.

Donald Clarke

Donald Clarke, a contributor to The Irish Times, is Chief Film Correspondent and a regular columnist

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An Impossible Love

A chronicle of the unconditional love between a mother and her daughter, from 1958 to the present day, which is endangered by an unsteady and manipulative father. WARNING: Contains High Impact Sex Scenes.
In the late 1950s in Châteauroux, France, Rachel, a modest office worker, meets Philippe, a brilliant young man born to a bourgeois family. This brief but passionate connection results in the birth of a daughter, Chantal. Philippe refuses to marry outside of his social class and Rachel has to raise their daughter alone. Regardless, Chantal is a great source of happiness for Rachel. She wishes for Philippe to legally acknowledge his daughter, which would give her his last name. A battle of more than ten years ensues, which will eventually break up all of their lives. — Hugo Van Herpe
This is a family drama starting off from the 1950s right up to modern times. Our protagonist is Rachel an office secretary who by chance meets Philippe at her work place. Philippe and Rachel come from opposing social classes. Rachel is from a humble working class family whilst Philippe was born into a wealthy bourgeois family. Despite the social differences between the two a brief relationship is formed resulting in the birth of a daughter Chantal. In 1950s a child born out of wedlock is frowned upon and to this end Rachel hopes Philippe would marry her, which he refuses to do so because of her low social status. Philippe also refuses to acknowledge his daughter legally initially. After many years once Chantal becomes a teenager Philippe recognises Chantal as his daughter and the pair become close. This seemingly innocent and loving relationship hides a dark secret Philippe abuses his daughter which results in a breakdown in relationship between Rachel and her daughter Chantal. Both Rachel and Chantal try to move on from this traumatising episode but the damage is done. Eventually Chantal now a mother herself becomes completely estranged from her mother Rachel. As Chantal subconsciously holds her mother responsible for the abuse she experienced at the hands of Philippe since her mother was the person who pushed Philippe into becoming more involved in her life as her father. Fortunately the separation gives Chantal perspective allowing her to both process her grief and forgive her mother realising she was also a victim this culminates in a reconciliation between mother and daughter.

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Review: An Impossible Love

by Fabien Lemercier

02/10/2018 - Passion, manipulation and tragic consequences are at stake in this adaptation of Christine Angot's novel by Catherine Corsini

"It’s the story of an eternal and banal love that brings all things good and bad with it every day." It's 1958 in Châteauroux, a small town in the French province and a couple takes to the dancefloor to dance to a song by Dalida, whose premonitory words will haunt the forty years that follow this love at first sight. A vast temporal arc based on a novel by Christine Angot , which Catherine Corsini has adapted in her new film, An Impossible Love [ + see also: trailer film profile ] , screened at the 33 rd Festival International du Film Francophone de Namur (FIFF) after its premiere at the end of August at the Festival du Film Francophone d’Angoulême and just before its French release on 7 November.

Going back to the roots of a relationship between a mother and her daughter (who tells the story via a voiceover), the feature film is split into three phases, beginning with a brief romance between the modest and determined Rachel ( Virginie Efira ), a pretty single 25-year-old typist, and the dark handsome Philippe ( Niels Schneider ), who has come to work as a translator on an American base nearby and is the son of a family of Parisian doctors. Intellectual fascination and lust make Rachel the consenting victim of an affair that Philip openly announces as not having any marital future due to it being "beyond social order" ("if you had been rich, it would have been different, perhaps"), before returning to Paris a few months later.

But Rachel is pregnant and will never stop trying to get recognition for her daughter Chantal and seeing Philippe again, who will play cat and mouse with her feelings and expectations for years, responding to letters, then disappearing before coming back again, planting red flags (he marries a wealthy young woman), before disappearing once again. Time passes, Rachel leads a lonely work life, raising her only daughter in the myth of her ectoplasmic father. But as a teenager ( Estelle Lescure ), Philippe finally agrees to see them again, and to recognise Chantal as his. A decision that will have far-reaching consequences for the mother and daughter and which will poison their subsequent relationship (with Jehnny Beth as Chantal, who also becomes a wife and mother in turn).

Dissecting the strong grip of a perverse manipulator on a woman, blindly in love, against a backdrop of social class rejection, An Impossible Love uses a very classic form, advancing in time with well-balanced jump cuts (based on a screenplay written by the director with Laurette Polmanss ), all while painting a terrible portrait of the very bad karma resulting from an emotional passion. However, without their performances being implicated, the real ages of the two main actors pose some problems (Virgina Efira is moderately credible as a 26-year-old and Niels Schneider seems to age like Dorian Gray), as is the recourse to the narrative voice-over that certainly pays tribute to Christine Angot's text, but which distances the viewer from the cruel unfolding of events. Choices that nevertheless stem from a faithful desire to embrace several destinies and impossible loves (between mother, father and daughter) in the same film, a theme that the filmmaker never loses sight of in her desire to lift the veil on the baseness at work to the detriment of the purity of hearts.

Produced by Chaz Productions , An Impossible Love was co-produced by France 3 Cinéma , the Belgian outfit Artemis Productions and Le pacte, which is handling international sales.

(Translated from French)

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An Impossible Love

Original title: un amour impossible.

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An Impossible Love is 9568 on the JustWatch Daily Streaming Charts today. The movie has moved up the charts by 13402 places since yesterday. In Australia, it is currently more popular than Tarung Sarung but less popular than Cheaper by the Dozen.

A chronicle of the unconditional love between a mother and her daughter, from 1958 to the present day, which is endangered by an unsteady and manipulative father.

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Streaming Charts The JustWatch Daily Streaming Charts are calculated by user activity within the last 24 hours. This includes clicking on a streaming offer, adding a title to a watchlist, and marking a title as 'seen'. This includes data from ~1.3 million movie & TV show fans per day.

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An Impossible Love

A chronicle of the unconditional love between a mother and her daughter, from 1958 to the present day, which is endangered by an unsteady and manipulative father.

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‘Challengers’ review: Zendaya serves up an ace in steamy love triangle

Movie review.

Is there anyone in cinema right now who has a gaze as coolly assured as Zendaya’s? In Luca Guadagnino’s tennis love triangle “Challengers,” she owns the movie and the camera, eyeing it as if daring it to reveal her thoughts. As Tashi Duncan, a tennis megastar-turned-coach after an injury, she’s utterly believable as a young woman accustomed to being looked at, an athlete frustrated by not having perfect control over her body, a person trying to figure out what life looks like when you can no longer do what you were born to do.

Zendaya is the main reason to watch “Challengers,” which is made with great style but ultimately is, well, a romantic triangle with an awful lot of artfully sweaty tennis. The two other points of the triangle are men Tashi has known since her years as a teenage tennis phenom: Art (Mike Faist, Riff in Steven Spielberg’s “ West Side Story ”) and Patrick (Josh O’Connor), longtime friends and rivals on the court and off. Justin Kuritzkes’ screenplay moves us around in time; we learn early on that Tashi and Art are married and that she’s his coach — a complicated dynamic — and that both now have little contact with Patrick, who’s down on his luck. Using a crucial tennis match between Art and Patrick in the present as a framing device, we’re whooshed into various moments in their mutual past to understand the relationships and back again, quicker than an ace serve.

Set to a throbby, intoxicating score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, “Challengers” homes in on the details of tennis: the perfectly beaded sweat, the grunt-and-thwack sound of a player unleashing a racket on a ball, the way a top athlete seems to know just where the ball will be coming, even before it’s hit. Zendaya’s Tashi is never still on the court, dancing a tensile tango with the ball as partner, revealing the person her character is by the way she reacts in the moment.

But the real drama of “Challengers” is meant to happen off the court, and here Guadagnino, whose specialty is swoony love stories (“ Call Me By Your Name ,” “ I Am Love ”), reminds us that he’s very good at the sweet romance of kissing scenes, and at creating a charged mood between two (or three) people. (There’s a wildly over-the-top windstorm near the end that surely categorizes as A Bit Much, but makes for great drama.) If “Challengers” sometimes feels a little too talky, or if sometimes we’re too aware that neither of these men seem quite worthy of Tashi — well, that’s the way the ball bounces. It’s not a perfect movie, but Zendaya makes it a great pleasure.

With Zendaya, Mike Faist, Josh O’Connor. Directed by Luca Guadagnino, from a screenplay by Justin Kuritzkes. 131 minutes. Rated R for language throughout, some sexual content and graphic nudity. Opens April 25 at multiple theaters.

Challengers and the Allure of the Sexy Tennis Movie

The Luca Guadagnino film is a hard-hitting metaphor for the most basic human urge: desire

In Challengers , tennis is a metaphor for the most basic human urge: desire. (At one point, I found myself feeling jealous of a racket Zendaya smashed to smithereens, or the ball being pummeled back and forth between Art and Patrick.) As directed by Luca Guadagnino, it’s a hot, sweaty spectacle—one that confirms the Sexy Tennis Movie as a definitive canon. Tennis and sex make the perfect match—the very act of flirting can feel like a metaphorical game of tennis. Plus, it’s a sport in which women have achieved greater parity with men, and what’s hotter than equality? Sexy Tennis Movies like Challengers might seem silly, but they’re really about power dynamics in relationships, human fallibilities, and ambition.

Whether it’s a movie about tennis or civil war, it’s my strong belief that any film is improved with the presence of Kirsten Dunst. Wimbledon , the 2004 film starring Dunst opposite Paul Bettany, is no exception. Wimbledon is the foundational tennis rom-com. Confident American pro Lizzie Bradbury meets bumbling English player Peter Colt during his final appearance at the sport’s greatest tournament. Lizzie lights a fire in Peter and, somewhere in between all the sex they’re having, the aging pro finds it in himself to beat the odds.

If Wimbledon is like a warm hug, then Woody Allen’s Match Point is … less so. In the 2005 film, retired tennis pro Chris (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) strikes up a friendship with one of his wealthy students, Tom. Chris embarks on a steamy affair with Tom’s beautiful fianceé, Nola (Scarlett Johansson), before things quickly get dark. (There is a gun hidden in a tennis bag.)

And if Wimbledon is a serve, then Challengers is an ace. The films might not be playing in the same league, but they share a central metaphor: Tennis is the prism through which we learn how the characters feel about each other and themselves. Sitting on the beach, a sirenlike Tashi tells an arrogant Patrick that he “doesn’t know” what tennis really is, before concluding: “It’s a relationship.” In the film, his and Art’s playing styles represent two conflicting factions of Tashi’s innermost desires. Bad boy Patrick plays “show tennis,” with flashy shots designed to make the crowd whoop. On the other side of the net, Art plays “percentage tennis”—a safer game, less exciting to watch, but more consistent. (Who among us hasn’t been torn between two men like this?)

Challengers is also a stunning visual spectacle. (Bone structure! Balls! Bodies! Backhands! It’s truly got it all.) Tennis has always had its own distinct aesthetic, from the rackets to the court and tennis skirts. Many real-life tennis legends, like Serena Williams and Roger Federer, have branched out into fashion design, underlining it as one of the more fashion-forward sports. Challengers marks the first film costuming credit for Jonathan Anderson, creative director at Loewe and founder of luxury fashion brand JW Anderson. The girls (and the gays) owe him big-time for masterminding Zendaya’s courtside looks, in which she’s impossibly chic in shades and Chanel flats, without a hair of her perfectly blow-dried bob out of place.

Speaking of which, Challengers feels remarkably queer for a film about a heterosexual love triangle. Perhaps this is the touch of director Guadagnino—who brought Timothée Chalamet eating that peach to our screens in 2017 gay romance Call Me by Your Name. The main three characters of the new film are partially naked for a lot of it, whether it’s Art and Patrick in a steamy sauna, or Tashi strutting around fancy hotel rooms rubbing lotion onto her body. The relationship between Patrick and Art feels familial, adversarial, and also homoerotic at points. (There is a particular scene involving churro sticks that I’m still thinking about.) Guadagnino leaves the specifics of their history together (and their true feelings about each other) open to interpretation.

Then there is Zendaya, whose portrayal of an alpha-female tennis girlboss seems destined to spark a million lesbian awakenings. Honestly? As a gay man, she briefly had me reconsidering my sexuality, too. (We say we want “gay representation,” but what we really mean is more films starring Dom Top Zendaya.) The first time Patrick meets Tashi, he turns to Art and whispers: “I’d let her fuck me with the racket.” This could be read as him objectifying her—and he is. But he is also drawn to her power, precisely because it’s an inversion of the standard heterosexual relationship dynamic.

Challengers almost feels like a queer movie about straight people. This might be a nod to the fact that, in the real world, some of its sport’s biggest stars are queer. In my experience, many LGBTQ+ people love tennis; and growing up, I was drawn to the sport at least in part because it’s more inclusive than most team sports. (And because female players in particular, like Serena and Venus Williams , embody a survivor spirit that unites most gay icons.)

The story of one of tennis’s greatest queer champions is told in 2017’s Battle of the Sexes. The film, starring Emma Stone and Steve Carell, is based on the true story of the 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. King had become one of the most prominent feminist figures in the United States, after founding the Women’s Tennis Association and campaigning for equal prize money for women. Riggs—a retired player and self-styled chauvinist pig—challenged her to the match to prove that men were inherently better tennis players than women. At a moment of major cultural change, the stakes couldn’t have been higher.

As the film depicts it, in the run-up to the match, King discovers she is attracted to women. While married to her husband, she embarks on an affair with hairstylist Marilyn. The movie has a wider social message, but it also reverberates with sexual tension. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Marilyn says, the first time she sees King play. “It must be intoxicating being inside your skin.” Again, tennis is framed as a relationship. “You’re just a phase,” King’s husband, Larry, tells Marilyn, warning her off his wife. “Tennis is her true love—and if you get between her and the game, you’re gone.”

In the Sexy Tennis Movie canon, female leads are not presented as subordinate. In the final scene of Wimbledon , we’re told that Lizzie goes on to win both the U.S. Open and Wimbledon twice. In the movie and the real Battle of the Sexes match, King defeated Riggs in a symbolic victory for women everywhere, and has spent the rest of her life campaigning for gender equality and social justice. These hard-won rights transcend tennis, and sport itself. But I think equality is actually at the heart of why tennis films are often so wrought with sexual tension. An evenly matched game is always much more thrilling to watch, or play—and if tennis really is “a relationship,” the same rule applies.

In its final moments, Challengers lures its spectators into thinking Patrick and Art are the focus. (My fantasies were fulfilled when we, the audience, literally became the ball being smacked between the two of them.) But whoever wins their on-court showdown starts to feel less important compared with Tashi rediscovering her fire—and her roar. Beyond the serving and the sex, Challengers is really a story about being brave enough to fight for what—or who—you really want. What could be hotter than that?

Louis Staples is a freelance culture writer and critic based in London, UK. He writes “Cultural Staples” — a fortnightly culture essay at Bazaar.com. His work is featured in The Cut, The Guardian, Vogue, Rolling Stone, and Variety.

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Love Means Nothing in Tennis but Everything in “Challengers”

By Justin Chang

Zendaya holding two tennis balls with a tennis court in the background

A meal is never just a meal in a Luca Guadagnino movie; each bite is a prelude to a kiss, every feast a form of foreplay. In his shimmering melodrama “I Am Love” (2009), whose beauties range from the churches of Sanremo to the alabaster countenance of Tilda Swinton, the most ravishing image is a plate of prawns, passionately prepared and breathlessly consumed. Food is even more boldly eroticized in “Call Me by Your Name” (2017), which features suggestively oozing egg yolk and a memorably despoiled peach. And what of “Bones and All” (2022), which, being a cannibal romance, brings Guadagnino’s fixations with food and flesh to a gristly point of convergence? Let’s just say it’s his one picture that’s ideally viewed on an empty stomach.

“Challengers,” Guadagnino’s irrepressibly entertaining new movie, serves up a lighter repast—a post-horror palate cleanser, seasoned with generous sprinklings of sweat. It unfolds in the low-fat, high-energy world of competitive tennis, but even here the characters are very much what they eat (or don’t). Early on, Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), a blond tennis champ mired in an early-thirties slump, passes through a kitchen stocked with fitness drinks, to be ingested on a schedule enforced by his wife and coach, Tashi Duncan (Zendaya). Art is disciplined to a fault, and his regimen hints at a joyless caution that, in the eyes of a cinematic voluptuary like Guadagnino, already seems like defeat. By contrast, another player, the rakishly handsome Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), is dieting only because he’s flat broke. As he drifts from tournament to tournament, he looks so pitiably hungry that, at one point, a stranger kindly offers him half of her breakfast sandwich. But, as Patrick tears into his first meal in a while, his sheer gusto is its own sign of triumph; it warns us not to count him out.

The year is 2019, and Art and Patrick, both in need of a boost, are preparing to face each other in a Challenger tournament, the second tier of competitive tennis, in New Rochelle. The professional implications are minor, but the emotional stakes couldn’t be higher. Thirteen years ago, in happier times, Art and Patrick were best friends and doubles partners; then along came Tashi, a tennis prodigy with her own dreams of stardom. Both boys were smitten; Patrick wooed her first, but it was Art she married, pouring her talent and ambition into his career after injury derailed her own. “Challengers,” in other words, comes at you like an amped-up, Adidas-sponsored “Jules and Jim”—a funny, tempestuous, and exuberantly lusty story about how three athletic demigods see their destinies upended. And Guadagnino tells it the way he knows best, with a sometimes exasperating but ultimately irresistible surfeit of style.

We begin and end at that Challenger tournament, where the sun beats down on a spectacle of unrivalled hotness. The camera, commanded by the cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, seems to be everywhere at once, exulting in the glory of bared chests and sweat-matted leg hair. A thunderous techno score, composed by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, pulses and surges hypnotically beneath the action, never quite drowning out the men’s grunts of effort and release. In the stands, the spectators jerk their heads dutifully left and right, but the camera keeps finding Tashi’s gaze, fixed straight ahead. She alone sees past the individual strokes, and the over-all score, to perceive the deeper psychological game her boys are playing.

From this narrative baseline, the backstory tumbles out in all directions, sustaining a dizzying rally of flashbacks and flash-forwards across a decade-plus narrative span. The screenwriter, Justin Kuritzkes, ingeniously employs the structure of a tennis match, elastic yet compartmentalized, to track the fluctuations of his characters’ fortunes. He pulls us back to game days at Stanford, then lobs us forward several years to a competition in Atlanta, with a number of battery-recharging stopovers at the New Rochelle match in between. It doesn’t entirely work; the ball-smashing cuts between time frames get repetitive, and the net effect, so to speak, is of weighty accumulation when a nimbler acceleration is called for. Still, like any skilled opponent, the movie keeps us off balance, revealing what happened beforehand with sharp narrative backhands.

In a flash, then, Art and Patrick are eighteen again, inseparable buddies with insatiable appetites. In one scene, they stuff their faces with hot dogs; later, one naughtily bites off the end of the other’s churro. If your innuendo alarm is going off, “Challengers” is just getting warmed up. So is Tashi, who bursts onto the scene as a Stanford-bound player, and whose brilliance on the court sets the boys’ hearts aflutter. Yet, as eager as they are to wield the racquets in their pockets, the triangle comes together slowly. A hotel-room flirtation seems headed in the promising direction of a three-way, but Tashi, a master of the tease, backs away at the moment of peak arousal. “I’m not a home-wrecker,” she declares, and we know instinctively what she means. In toying with Art’s and Patrick’s affections, she exposes a soft spot, even a hint of unspoken desire, in their rambunctious camaraderie.

That failed seduction isn’t the only instance of coitus interruptus. So effortlessly does Guadagnino establish a vibe of free-floating horndoggery that it takes a moment to realize how little actual intercourse there is in the movie. It scarcely matters. It would be hard to overstate what a glorious, no-fucks-given rebuke “Challengers” represents to the regrettably puritanical ethos that governs most mainstream Hollywood releases. If the movie makes little distinction between sex scenes and non-sex scenes, it’s because Guadagnino knows that people can’t be readily separated into minds and bodies. He sees his characters whole, libidos and all, and their every expression and gesture throws off a coruscating erotic energy. The effect isn’t titillating; it’s clarifying.

In sex, as in tennis, anticipation is everything. Watch how the director pokes his camera, with unconcealed thirst, into a men’s locker room, or plops Art and Patrick down in a sauna, as though cruising around for gay-porn scenarios that never materialize. But with anticipation can also come deflation; Guadagnino treats sex as a conversation, and any conversation can go south. In the movie’s most exquisitely modulated and carnally forthright scene, Patrick and Tashi begin to make love, only to discover, in the heat of an ill-timed argument, that their limbs and loins are far more in synch than their egos and athletic aspirations. The encounter ends abruptly, and the relationship soon follows suit. Not even love can trump their love of the game.

It is Tashi’s career-ending injury that spurs her second act, personal and professional, with Art. Somewhere along the way they have a daughter, but she’s a narrative afterthought; “Challengers,” like its characters, turns tennis into tunnel vision. As Art’s coach, Tashi is hellbent on his success, and he needs all her drive and smarts to direct him. Faist has as much live-wire physicality here as he did, as Riff, in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” (2021), but his rascally impulses have given way to an elfin sweetness, a melancholy grasp of his own limitations. For Tashi, Art is the boringly safe bet, the player and spouse who will never fall below or rise above a certain threshold. Patrick is the more gifted but far more volatile wild card, and O’Connor’s devilishly charming grin keeps finding ways to woo us—not that we’re the ones who need persuading.

This isn’t the first time that Zendaya has been stuck on the sidelines watching two men go at it. Scarcely two months have passed since the arrival of “Dune: Part Two,” which made her stand watch, in helpless horror, over a climactic and unsubtly homoerotic spectacle of male violence. The hand-to-hand combat in “Challengers” is juicier still, if markedly less bloody; no one gets stabbed, and the fate of planetary civilizations does not hang in the balance. Even so, Tashi’s tense gaze seems to contain a small cosmos of anguished possibilities. Is she wryly envisioning herself as the ball that Art and Patrick keep slamming over the net? Or perhaps she’s the trophy that one of them will hoist aloft—and, if so, does that make her the inevitable winner or the ultimate loser?

These are intriguing if somewhat dispiriting questions, and I doubt I’m alone in wishing that Tashi’s own athletic dreams hadn’t come to a premature end. My mind flashed back to the wanly likable “Wimbledon” (2004), which benched its female star, Kirsten Dunst, while ushering her male beau into the winner’s circle. Guadagnino has two men to usher, and the final stretch of “Challengers” smacks of both desperation and bravura as it pulls out stop after stop: suddenly, this sports movie becomes a gale-force disaster flick and a buddy comedy of remarriage. If the wrap-up feels overextended—right down to a closing twist that you’ll see coming several tennis courts away—you can hardly blame Guadagnino for falling so hard for his players, or for getting so entangled in the geometry of their desires. He lives to serve, and he wants the game to go on forever. ♦

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‘Egoist’ Review: A Romance With a Twist

In this ultimately sentimental drama, a lonely fashion magazine editor in Tokyo meets a personal trainer with a secret.

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A bathroom mirror image of two smiling men, one standing, styling the hair of the other with a dryer.

By Devika Girish

Kosuke (Ryohei Suzuki), the protagonist of Daishi Matsunaga’s “Egoist,” is a lonely fashion magazine editor in Tokyo, with high cheekbones and deep pockets. When he meets and falls for Ryuta (Hio Miyazawa), a fresh-faced personal trainer, it all seems like a dream — until Ryuta reveals that he moonlights as a prostitute to make ends meet, and that their romance complicates his livelihood. Kosuke makes a proposition: He’ll give Ryuta a monthly stipend to cover his expenses.

It’s the perfect set up for a juicy erotic thriller. But “Egoist,” adapted from the novel of the same name by Makoto Takayama, has many surprises in store, not all of them pleasant. Halfway through the movie, a tragic twist turns what seems like a sexy romance full of intrigue into a sentimental (albeit handsomely performed) drama about loss.

Suzuki and Miyazawa have crackling chemistry, and they turn in delicate, finely tuned performances that are sometimes undercut by the script’s broad strokes and unsubtle flourishes. When we first meet Kosuke, his designer outfits, puffed chest and sad eyes show all we need to know; his voice-over, which tells us that clothes are his “armor,” is redundant. So are the film’s many montages underlining Ryuta’s plight — he toils at multiple jobs to care for his sick mother — that reduce the character to something of a sob story.

Class is the central theme in “Egoist”: Kosuke and Ryuta’s star-crossed romance shows us how money, and the struggle to make ends meet, can complicate even the most genuine love. But as the film leans into melodrama, it loses both its friction and frisson, and a steaming-hot premise turns into something cold to the touch.

Egoist Not Rated. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters.

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Movie Reviews

Watch a tense romantic triangle play out on the tennis court in 'challengers'.

Justin Chang

Art (Mike Faist), Tashi (Zendaya) and Patrick (Josh O'Connor) are embroiled in a love triangle in Challengers . Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures hide caption

Art (Mike Faist), Tashi (Zendaya) and Patrick (Josh O'Connor) are embroiled in a love triangle in Challengers .

As much as I liked his Suspiria remake and his cannibal thriller Bones and All , it's nice to see the Italian director Luca Guadagnino make a movie that doesn't end with buckets of blood. His new sports movie, Challengers , instead comes drenched in buckets of sweat, and it's the most purely entertaining thing he's made in years. It gives us a romantic triangle set in the world of tennis, and it stars three superb actors in roles that are as athletically demanding as they are emotionally rich.

It begins on a tennis court in New Rochelle, a town just north of New York City, the site of a prestigious second-tier competition known as a Challenger tournament. On one side of the net is Art Donaldson, played by Mike Faist. Art has won three of the four Grand Slam events but has now hit a bit of a slump. He's squaring off against his former best friend, Patrick Zweig, played by Josh O'Connor. Patrick hasn't had as illustrious a career as Art, but he may well be the more gifted player.

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They're in love and they eat people, in 'bones and all'.

Watching them anxiously from the stands is Art's wife and coach, Tashi Duncan, played by Zendaya. It's clear that these three characters have some complicated history, which Guadagnino and the screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes proceed to unravel through a dizzying array of flashbacks.

And so we jump back 13 years to when Art and Patrick are buddies and doubles partners. Around this time they meet Tashi, a terrific tennis player who's about to begin her first year at Stanford. The boys begin a friendly competition for Tashi's affections, which the more confident Patrick initially wins. But after various ups and downs, including a twist that derails Tashi's tennis career, she winds up marrying Art and becoming his coach. Now, years later, this fateful Challenger tournament has brought the estranged Art and Patrick face-to-face once more. It's here that Patrick privately confronts Tashi and makes a startling proposition, asking her to be his coach.

In Teen Drama 'We Are Who We Are,' We're Still Figuring Out Who We Are

Even when all the toggling between past and present gets a little repetitive, Challengers throws off an unstoppable energy. In the tennis scenes, the camera seems to be everywhere at once, and a hypnotic techno score, by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross , pulses and surges beneath the action. And like Guadagnino's Call Me by Your Name , Challengers has a forthright sensuality that reminds you how sexually timid most mainstream American movies are by comparison.

There isn't all that much sex in the film, but there's so much erotic tension and atmosphere that it doesn't matter. Guadagnino is a master of the tease — and so, it turns out, is Tashi. In one early, flirty scene with the three of them, Tashi not only maintains the upper hand, but also reveals that these two dudes might be more attracted to each other than they let on. As the years pass, though, their youthful desire for Tashi gives way to a deeper need.

As Art, Faist shows as much live-wire physicality here as he did in the West Side Story remake, though his performance becomes more melancholy over time as Art faces his limitations. O'Connor, by contrast, is all swagger as Patrick, forever leading with his devilishly charming smile. And then there's Zendaya, who's so brilliant in her early tennis scenes that I wish Tashi hadn't been sidelined and forced into playing the role of mentor and muse to two men. But as in the recent Dune: Part Two , Zendaya keeps you watching with her mix of fierce intelligence and emotional uncertainty — over who will win the match, and what it might mean for her future.

Will Tashi stick with Art, the safe, skillful player who may not have the gumption to be one of the all-time greats? Or will she return to Patrick, the superior but more volatile talent? The movie resolves this quandary in a grand finale that's at once thrilling and maddening in the way it pushes this triangle and this tennis match to the breaking point. But by then, you can't blame Guadagnino for loving his characters so passionately, or feeling so reluctant to let them go. If it were up to him, the game would never end.

Review: Zendaya's 'Challengers' serves up saucy melodrama – and some good tennis, too

The saucy tennis melodrama “Challengers” is all about the emotional games we play with each other, though there are certainly enough volleys, balls and close-up sweat globules if you’re more into jockstraps than metaphors.

Italian director Luca Guadagnino ( “Call Me By Your Name” ) puts an art-house topspin on the sports movie, with fierce competition, even fiercer personalities and athletic chutzpah set to the thumping beats of a techno-rific Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross score. “Challengers” (★★★ out of four; rated R; in theaters Friday) centers on the love triangle between doubles partners-turned-rivals ( Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor ) and a teen wunderkind ( Zendaya ) and how lust , ambition and power dynamics evolve their relationships over the course of 13 years.

The movie opens with Art (Faist) and Tashi (Zendaya) as the It couple of pro tennis: He’s eyeing a U.S. Open title, the only tournament he’s never won, while she’s his intense coach, manager and wife, a former sensation along the lines of a Venus or Serena whose career was cut short by a gnarly knee injury. To build up his flagging confidence after recent losses, Tashi enters Art in a lower-level event that he can dominate – until he faces ex-bestie Patrick (O’Connor) in the final match.

Justin Kuritzkes’ soapy screenplay bounces between that present and the trios’ complicated past via flashbacks, starting when Art and Patrick – a ride-or-die duo known as “Fire and Ice” – both have eyes for Tashi. All three are 18 and the hormones are humming: The boys have been tight since they were preteens at boarding school, but a late-night, three-way makeout session, and the fact that she’ll only give her number to whoever wins the guys' singles match, creates a seismic crack that plays itself out over the coming years.

All three main actors ace their arcs and changing looks over time – that’s key in a nonlinear film like this that’s all over the place. As Tashi, Zendaya plays a woman who exudes an unshakable confidence, though her passion for these two men is seemingly her one weakness. Faist (“West Side Story”) crafts Art as a talented precision player whose love for the game might not be what it once was, while O’Connor (“The Crown”) gives Patrick a charming swagger with and without a racket, even though his life has turned into a bit of a disaster.

From the start, the men's closeness hints at something more than friendship, a quasi-sexual tension that Tashi enjoys playing with: She jokes that she doesn’t want to be a “homewrecker” yet wears a devilish smile when Art and Patrick kiss, knowing the mess she’s making.

Tennis is “a relationship,” Tashi informs them, and Guadagnino uses the sport to create moments of argumentative conversation as well as cathartic release. Propelled by thumping electronica, his tennis scenes mix brutality and grace, with stylish super-duper close-ups and even showing the ball’s point of view in one dizzying sequence. Would he do the same with, say, curling or golf? It’d be cool to see because more often than not, you want to get back to the sweaty spectacle.

Guadagnino could probably make a whole movie about masculine vulnerability in athletics rather than just tease it with “Challengers,” with revealing bits set in locker rooms and saunas. But the movie already struggles with narrative momentum, given the many tangents in Tashi, Art and Patrick’s thorny connections: While not exactly flabby, the film clocks in at 131 minutes and the script could use the same toning up as its sinewy performers.

While “Challengers” falls nebulously somewhere between a coming-of-age flick, dysfunctional relationship drama and snazzy sports extravaganza, Guadagnino nevertheless holds serve with yet another engaging, hot-blooded tale of flawed humans figuring out their feelings.

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CHALLENGERS

Running time: 131 minutes. Rated R (language throughout, some sexual content and graphic nudity). In theaters.

When the movie “Challengers” hits Prime Video after its theatrical run, I suspect the response will echo that of last year’s most controversial film, “ Saltburn .”

Like Emerald Fennell’s shapeshifting mystery, “Challengers” is, at once, artful, addictive and deceptive. The salivating viewer believes it’s one thing, becomes sure it’s another and then leaves with a different theory altogether.

There are more similarities. Directed by Luca Guadagnino (“ Call Me By Your Name ”), the movie features sexy, young stars Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist in various states of undress, and their characters’ open ending will either intrigue or infuriate you.

Love “Challengers” or loathe it — and I look forward to the angry emails from the latter camp — you’ll definitely want to talk about it. And isn’t that half the fun?

The delish and devilish film, which jumps erratically back and forth through 13 years of events, tracks a trio of hotshot junior tennis players on the verge of going pro.

There are best friends, and doubles partners, Patrick Zweig (O’Connor) and Art Donaldson (Faist) — truly inspired fake tennis names — and the force of nature Tashi Duncan (Zendaya).

Despite being a teen with no grand slam titles, Tashi has heaps of high-profile endorsements, and it’s widely assumed she’ll be the sport’s next big thing. Think Coco Gauff a few years back.

Mike Faist, Josh O'Connor and Zendaya star in "Challengers."

The boys, competitive in more ways than one, lustily chase after the phenom, and later that night in their hotel room she seductively poses a challenge: The player who wins the men’s final gets her number.

Their scandalous story isn’t told linearly, though. More than a decade in the future, down-on-his-luck Patrick is sleeping in his car and playing small challenger tournaments to squeeze out a buck to buy dinner.

A devastating injury killed Tashi’s career, while unassuming Art, now her husband, has become a multiple slam winner who’s begun to struggle and is toying with retirement. Tashi, more concerned with victory than romantic love, is his vicious coach.

Then, Art and Patrick — now bitter nemeses — unexpectedly face off at the challenger tourney. And all sorts of dormant tensions between the three athletes reemerge.

Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) is a phenom whose career is cut short by an injury.

Guadagnino revels in strange relationships, such as the taboo age-separation in “Call Me By Your Name” and the smitten cannibals of “ Bones and All .”

On the surface, “Challengers” would appear to be your average smoldering love triangle film, but, true to form, it’s a lot more complicated than that. There’s a “Will they? Won’t they?” vibe with just about everybody.

And tennis, wrongly seen by many as a polite country club hobby, is visualized as violent and animalistic — a bloodsport of vengeance and repressed desire.

Getting that across beautifully, the director and cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom shoot matches in badass ways. During one point, we watch from the perspective of the ball being brutally pummeled by the two guys.

Josh O'Connor and Mike Faist in Challengers

Using words rather than rackets, the three sly actors attack each other with their conniving and tactical performances.

Tashi, who talks more about tennis than her marriage or child, cares solely about winning. Even sex for her is a form of match manipulation. Zendaya, perfectly cast, is siren-like and terrifying — a real “coffee is for closers only” type.

And O’Connor and Faist, who I bet will explode similarly to Barry Keoghan, forge a believable bond that, as their friendship fades, becomes even more intense.

Zendaya at the Australian premiere of "Challengers" on March 26, 2024.

Because “Challengers” is, at its core, a sports movie, the last scene will rile up some people because the final result is not entirely clear.

However — and I could be wrong! — after the high-stakes tiebreak in the end, I walked away certain that something vital had been fixed, not broken.

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An Impossible Love review
Jehnny Beth and Virginie Efira in An Impossible Love. Efira shows how Rachel's humility and acceptance amount to a kind of self-abasement and self-harm. She is like one of the young mothers that ...
'An Impossible Love' ('Un amour impossible'): Film Review
In An Impossible Love (Un amour impossible), which was adapted from Angot's 2015 best-seller of the same title, director Catherine Corsini depicts the writer's tumultuous childhood through the ...
An Impossible Love
Jan 13, 2020. Rated: 3/5 • Jul 16, 2019. Jul 16, 2019. A chronicle of the unconditional love between a mother and her daughter, from 1958 to the present day, which is endangered by an unsteady ...
An Impossible Love
An Impossible Love (French: Un amour impossible) is a 2018 French romantic drama film co-written and directed by Catherine Corsini, based on the 2015 novel of the same name by Christine Angot. Starring Virginie Efira, Niels Schneider and Jehnny Beth, the film chronicles the life of office worker Rachel as she falls in love with the wealthy Philippe, gives birth to their daughter Chantal, and ...
An Impossible Love review
An Impossible Love review - a mother and daughter driven apart. A toxic narcissist invades the lives of two women in Catherine Corsini's intimate study. Wendy Ide. Sun 6 Jan 2019 03.00 EST. W ...
An Impossible Love
An Impossible Love is a film that gains potency thanks to the dramatic tension that flows, envelopes you and surprises you. [Full Review in Spanish] Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jun 12, 2019
An Impossible Love review
An Impossible Love is an unbearably sad film dotted with brief glissando-like moments of sweet, sunny reprieve. A more constant joy in the film are the power of the performances, particularly that of Estelle Lescure as the adolescent Chantal, and of course Virginie Efira as Rachel. The love between these two characters - or the female ...
'An Impossible Love': London Review
France. 2018. 135 mins. The love at stake in Catherine Corsini's new drama isn't so much impossible as barely thinkable - and yet the story it tells is apparently a true one. Set over ...
An Impossible Love Review
An Impossible Love Review. 1958, Châteauroux, France. Office worker Rachel (Efrie) meets translator Philippe (Schneider) and the pair start a passionate affair. But, when Rachel falls pregnant ...
An Impossible Love
A romantic drama perhaps better suited overall to its literary source.
An Impossible Love (2018)
5/10. 5 out of 10. zapostolov 12 September 2023. "An Impossible Love" (2018) is a French film that attempts to explore the complexities of relationships and the evolving role of women in society. While it has some commendable aspects, it ultimately falls short in its execution, earning a rating of 5 out of 10.
An Impossible Love
C atherine Corsini's An Impossible Love, adapted from Christine Angot's novel, is a Trojan Horse of a movie. On the surface it is a sensual romance: there are sweeping flurries of piano music care of Grégoire Hetzel; idyllic, sun-kissed landscapes are captured by cinematographer Jeanne Lapoirie; and a soft, feminine voiceover is supplied ...
Gallic charm turns to baleful dark: An Impossible Love
Un Amour Impossible (An Impossible Love) is a brave, tough film with a strange lyrical beauty and a difficult premise at its core.. It's the 1950s and Rachel (Virginie Efira) is living in the ...
An Impossible Love
@Filmhouse, Edinburgh from Fri 15 Mar 2019 "My story is a familiar one," trills a chanteuse at a dance attended by Rachel (Virginie Efira) in a small French town in the late '50s. At first, this does seem to be the case as she circles the dance floor in the embrace of Philippe (Niels Schneider). An Impossible Love is more than an ordinary relationship drama, however.
‎An Impossible Love (2018) directed by Catherine Corsini • Reviews
Catherine Corsini's An Impossible Love (2018) is a tragic story that is so powerful an needed to be told on the big screen. Based on the book by Christine Angot, An Impossible Love, is propelled by the acting superiority of Virginie Efira and Niels Schneider. Although they are married in real life, it is difficult to think of them as a couple ...
An Impossible Love
Adapted from the novel by Christine Angot and co-written and directed by Catherine Corsini, An Impossible Love chronicles the 50-year relationship between Rachel (Virginie Efira), a vibrant young ...
An Impossible Love: Dark family drama where terrible things happen
Director: Catherine Corsini. Cert: 16. Genre: Drama. Starring: Virginie Efira, Niels Schneider, Jehnny Beth, Estelle Lescure. Running Time: 2 hrs 15 mins. Early on in a French drama whose lovely ...
An Impossible Love (2018)
A chronicle of the unconditional love between a mother and her daughter, from 1958 to the present day, which is endangered by an unsteady and manipulative father. WARNING: Contains High Impact Sex Scenes. In the late 1950s in Châteauroux, France, Rachel, a modest office worker, meets Philippe, a brilliant young man born to a bourgeois family.
Review: An Impossible Love
An Impossible Love. 02/10/2018 - Passion, manipulation and tragic consequences are at stake in this adaptation of Christine Angot's novel by Catherine Corsini. "It's the story of an eternal and banal love that brings all things good and bad with it every day." It's 1958 in Châteauroux, a small town in the French province and a couple takes ...
An Impossible Love / Un amour impossible (2018)
Directed by : Catherine Corsini Produced by : CHAZ Productions Genre: Fiction - Runtime: 2 h 15 min French release: 07/11/2018 Production year: 2017 At the e...
AN IMPOSSIBLE LOVE trailer
Based on a book by controversial French novelist Christine Angot - Claire Denis' co-writer on Let the Sunshine In - Corsini's film begins in the 1950s, as of...
An Impossible Love
Show all movies in the JustWatch Streaming Charts. Streaming charts last updated: 1:26:44 pm, 22/04/2024. An Impossible Love is 9545 on the JustWatch Daily Streaming Charts today. The movie has moved up the charts by 13564 places since yesterday. In Australia, it is currently more popular than Living in Bondage: Breaking Free but less popular ...
Watch An Impossible Love
An Impossible Love. Drama. 2h 10m 2018 French. A chronicle of the unconditional love between a mother and her daughter, from 1958 to the present day, which is endangered by an unsteady and ...
'Challengers' review: Zendaya serves up an ace in steamy love triangle
With Zendaya, Mike Faist, Josh O'Connor. Directed by Luca Guadagnino, from a screenplay by Justin Kuritzkes. 131 minutes. Rated R for language throughout, some sexual content and graphic nudity.
"Challengers" and Why We Can't Stop Loving Sexy Tennis Movies
The story of one of tennis's greatest queer champions is told in 2017's Battle of the Sexes.The film, starring Emma Stone and Steve Carell, is based on the true story of the 1973 tennis match ...
Love Means Nothing in Tennis but Everything in "Challengers"
Justin Chang reviews Luca Guadagnino's "Challengers," a love-triangle drama set in the world of competitive tennis and starring Zendaya, Josh O'Connor, and Mike Faist.
'Egoist' Review: A Romance With a Twist
Class is the central theme in "Egoist": Kosuke and Ryuta's star-crossed romance shows us how money, and the struggle to make ends meet, can complicate even the most genuine love.
'Challengers' review: A tense romantic triangle plays out on the tennis
As much as I liked his Suspiria remake and his cannibal thriller Bones and All, it's nice to see the Italian director Luca Guadagnino make a movie that doesn't end with buckets of blood.His new ...
'Challengers' review: Zendaya's new movie serves up saucy tennis
The movie opens with Art (Faist) and Tashi (Zendaya) as the It couple of pro tennis: He's eyeing a U.S. Open title, the only tournament he's never won, while she's his intense coach, manager ...
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Running time: 131 minutes. Rated R (language throughout, some sexual content and graphic nudity). In theaters. When the movie "Challengers" hits Prime Video after its theatrical run, I suspect ...

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