Woody Allen
Match Point

Summer, hot wind sweeping everything away, open-air cinema.

At the last minute, Veronica suggests going to see Match Point. Summer Veronica is a postmodern Rodin sculpture, with long, dark legs that, when crossed, induce vertigo. Synopsis: Veronica is also my wife's best friend, currently at the beach with the kids; any potential desire for Her is not only a buried thought, but rather one completely uprooted from reality. Even though, I must admit, she always remains a sight to behold, even in a Mini.

And that’s just fine; we seek beauty, not the point.

Deep down I know this film will leave me indifferent—every Allen film always has. After all, around here in every Midsummer Night’s Dream, at the lavish wedding feasts in Athens, people prefer, and are always drawn, to the exploits of Hermia and Lysander, to the nocturnal escapes of the lovers into the woods, and to the disputes of that faerie world.

Match Point by Woody Allen is a psychological thriller set in the upper echelons of London society, where fate and chance intertwine in a glacial, ruthless dance. The film seems centered on the figure of Chris Wilton, an ex-Irish tennis player who reinvents himself as an instructor in an exclusive club. Meeting Tom Hewett opens a door to a world of privilege and opportunity. Chris marries Chloe, Tom’s sister, and inserts himself perfectly into the family’s golden fabric. But the arrival of Nola Rice/Scarlett Johansson, aspiring American actress and Tom’s girlfriend, ignites a forbidden passion. The relationship between Chris and Nola burns with desire and lies, up to a breaking point where morality gives way to calculation. The film unfolds like a tennis match: every shot is a choice, every bounce a consequence. And like the ball bouncing on the net, fate can fall one way or the other. Allen constructs an elegant, icy thriller where chance becomes the true protagonist. The tension builds subtly, almost Hitchcockian, leading up to an ending that leaves the viewer with a sense of unease and amorality.

Besides the pleasant company, another reason that led me to accept the invitation was the feeling that this Allen film, unlike others, might pique my interest. In reality, once again, I find it hard to maneuver through Allenland, and as often happens, I search for escapes and distractions so as not to get too bored. In this hiatus between tennis and fate, between style and story, Match Point could be interpreted not just as a film, but as a perfect metaphor for the game, for life, and for risk.

Risk.

In classic tennis, the kind played by the greats of the past—Rod Laver, Björn Borg, John McEnroe—style was everything. There was elegance in the gesture, strategy in the shot, and an almost theatrical tension in every rally. Borg’s backhand was meditation, McEnroe’s serve-and-volley was pure improvisation, every point built, not just played; tennis was not just a sport to cheer from the stands: it was a narrative.

And it was macho, brawling, unpredictable—the matches between Connors and McEnroe are History.

In Match Point, Allen takes precisely this idea: the shot that decides everything, the point that can fall one way or the other, that fateful ball bouncing on the net, suspended for an eternal instant—that is the heart of the film. As in tennis of times gone by, where skill was measured in the ability to read your opponent, Chris Wilton also reads the world around him, manipulates it, plays it. But he does it without style, without ethics. He is a modern tennis player: cold, calculating.

He doesn’t seek beauty: he seeks the point.

Allen seems to tell us that the world has lost its elegant backhand, its romanticized serve-and-volley. Now you play only to win—even before, if truth be told—but the beauty of the gesture no longer counts; the film thus becomes a match between morals and opportunism, between fate and choice, and as in tennis, a single missed shot is enough to lose it all.

And in the midst of Chris Wilton’s algebraic calculation, she appears. Scarlett.

And everything dissolves.

The film vanishes, the plot shatters; everything melts away, even the urge to review, all fades before that inviting altar of flesh and desire, in the vision of those lips: red and luscious. Like the dawn over Sodom, they call one to the sweet torment of waiting, and every word she utters is a blade inscribing the heart with suspended grace; in Scarlett’s smile Eluard wrote the wind unhesitatingly, and Dante, lost and dazed by lust, lost his Beatrice, Guido—he who rides trembling but thoughtful—simply asked for a moment, a brief pause, to worship that fabled face. Tension rises; the Jewish Brooklyn intelligentsia—all that cultural baggage made up of neuroses, intellectual irony, and self-analysis—is finally blessed and dismissed.

Chance, coincidence, or hellish sequence, Veronica crosses her legs and vertigo reaches an impossible peak; that skewed X, ancient geometry of sin where the world bends and surrenders, the boundary between the righteous and the damned, between collapsing modesty and what becomes prey, those thighs pillars of storm and honey holding up the sky of the dance, the place where time grows unfaithful and flesh puts on carnival dress; Scarlett’s lips, those inexplicable lips, are the point where verses bend and poets get lost, bleed out, shudder; art that cannot be framed, a work of art to be loved with the tongue, flesh become liturgy, beauty that cannot be distinguished.

And if the world should end tomorrow, let it be between your curves, between your sighs, let it be in your womb, among your plans, let it be in your gaze, among our deliriums.

Game, Set and Match.