{"id":156906,"date":"2022-01-27T13:30:33","date_gmt":"2022-01-27T18:30:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=156906"},"modified":"2022-03-21T11:52:56","modified_gmt":"2022-03-21T15:52:56","slug":"the-reviews-review-blue-geometries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/01\/27\/the-reviews-review-blue-geometries\/","title":{"rendered":"Blue Geometries"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Photo by Ken Heaton, via Wikimedia Commons<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Early in the morning last week, in a funk of sleeplessness, I tuned in to the afternoon matches of Round Three at the Australian Open. The cool blue geometries of the courts in Melbourne\u2014especially when the sound is off\u2014are usually a balm to my mind. But there\u2019s always a danger that the match will be exciting, and when the Spanish up-and-comer Carlos Alcaraz fought through to a fourth set against Matteo \u201cThe Hammer\u201d Berrettini, I gave up and made coffee. Then I reread (for the fourth or fifth time) the opening pages of Rowan Ricardo Phillips\u2019s The Circuit<\/i><\/a>, his account of the year 2017 in tennis\u2014a year that witnessed the comebacks of Nadal and Federer, just when they seemed ready to pack it in\u2014and a rival to John McPhee\u2019s Levels of the Game <\/i><\/a>for the best book out there on the sport. Phillips watches games the way we all do\u2014on television\u2014but he sees more, and more clearly, than the rest of us. Before I knew it, I had read half the book, Berrettini won in five sets, and I was ready to face the day. \u2014Robyn Creswell
\n<\/b><\/p>\n

The other day I finally caught up with Pedro Almod\u00f3var\u2019s thirty-minute film The Human Voice<\/i>\u00a0(it came out in 2020), starring a single actor: Tilda Swinton. It\u2019s based on the same Cocteau play that Roberto Rossellini made into La Voce Umana<\/i> as part of his anthology film L\u2019Amore<\/i>, where Anna Magnani played the role of a woman on a phone in an apartment, trying to save a dead relationship. So I was expecting something similarly grandiose and extreme, but instead the movie was a study in concision and abruptness. Swinton\u2019s performance was so affecting because it was as deadpan as it was anguished, and there was something similar in Almod\u00f3var\u2019s direction. Swinton kept moving between a studio set and an elegant apartment, so that every emotion was on the cusp of having its theatricality revealed. Everything depended, I began to think, on Almod\u00f3var\u2019s cuts and transitions\u2014so that, in addition to being a beautiful picture of desolation, this short movie became an essay on a fluidity that only cinema can produce. I adored it. \u2014Adam Thirlwell<\/b><\/p>\n

I saw The Lost Daughter<\/i> over the weekend. In the translation to film, the novel\u2019s unsettling portrayal of maternal loneliness (the thing that makes Elena Ferrante\u2019s book a success) gets rather short shrift in favor of a fairly steamy love affair that becomes the centerpiece of the story\u2014but with such good-looking actors, who’s complaining? I can certainly recommend it as a hangover tonic, best taken on a Saturday afternoon. \u2014Lauren Kane<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two books on tennis and a performance by Tilda Swinton in Pedro Almod\u00f3var\u2019s newest study on cinematic fluidity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68386],"tags":[13206,67827,3450,28011,6690,883,288],"class_list":["post-156906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-reviews-review","tag-elena-ferrante","tag-featured","tag-jean-cocteau","tag-on-sports","tag-pedro-almodovar","tag-staff-picks","tag-tennis"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nBlue Geometries by The Paris Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"January 27, 2022 \u2013 Two books on tennis and a performance by Tilda Swinton in Pedro Almod\u00f3var\u2019s newest study on cinematic fluidity.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, 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