Try and catch him, Marty Mauser. Distinguishing features: table tennis champion. He runs, he shirks, he barges, he bluffs: he doesn't have a cent in his pocket and he invents everything to make ends meet and finance his sports trips. This comedy by Josh Safdie, nominated for nine Oscars, is enthusiastic and irrepressible, starring Timothée Chalamet, already winner of a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Comedy and also in the running for an Academy Award. He also stars Odessa A'zion and Gwyneth Paltrow, and features cameos by Abel Ferrara, David Mamet, and Fran Drescher.
The protagonist Mauser (Chalamet) is a young ping pong champion trying to make his way in the world of professional tennis, but the film is not one of the classic sports films, nor are there any great scenes of matches, challenges, or tournaments. Rather, Mauser accepts odd jobs, launches business ideas, and works hard to succeed. make his dream come true to become a champion.
He works as a clerk in his uncle's shoe shop, and in the back room he gets Rachel (A'zion), his (married) childhood friend, pregnant to the tune of Alphaville's "Forever Young" which opens the film, starting a whirlwind of scenes and sub-stories: above all, a ceiling that collapses under the weight of a bathtub that ends up on Abel Ferrara's dog, the meetings with the actress wife (Paltrow) of the rich industrialist who promises him a sponsorship, the humiliation that the latter inflicts on him in exchange for a ride to Tokyo on his private plane, even a bitter flashback to Auschwitz.
It's not a film that impresses you as a whole, but rather as a series of parts. Almost like standalone episodes, held together by the plot thread of the daring search for money through the exercise ofthe art of making doA story spanning nine months – the gestation of Marty and Rachel's baby – during which everything happens.
Set in post-World War II New York (but the soundtrack is entirely from the 1980s), it is inspired by the true story of Marty Reisman, known as the Needle, who was truly a phenomenon of athletic ability and inventiveness: he won five bronze medals at the World Table Tennis Championships.
Josh Safdie, at his first solo directorial effort after his split from his brother Benny (they recently co-wrote Uncut Gems), said he was struck by this story of a dreamer a tireless director who doesn't take no for an answer because he believes in his goal: an urgency of passion and exuberance that permeates Safdie's direction itself, even though he seems unable to always maintain control over the mechanism.
It's a vibrant and lively film, yet it lacks a bit of cohesion. Or maybe it's just that, under its period guise, the film is made up of the fragments of the American dream and a more realistic, and contemporary, alternation of victories and defeats, which makes everything seem more disconnected, in a frantic race that no longer has the certainty of final conquest.
At Cinema
Original title: Id., Production: USA 2025, Director: Josh Safdie, Screenplay: Josh Safdie, Ronald Bronstein, Editing: Josh Safdie, Ronald Bronstein, Photography: Darius Khondji, Main cast: Timothée Chalamet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Odessa A'zion, Running time: 149'.
