A tennis court is a terrible place to keep a secret. There are lines around everything, people watching from every angle, and someone ready to call you out the second you put a foot wrong. In Forty Love, that immaculate little pressure chamber belongs to Sacha Gallo (Paul Kircher), a 21-year-old player trained by his father to win a major title in Paris. Then Romeo Beckham arrives on the other side of the net.
Beckham plays the new rival who knocks Sacha’s beautifully managed life off its axis. He is also making his screen debut, which means the internet has an easy headline before the film has even opened. The more interesting story is the one Forty Love is actually selling: what happens to a boy whose entire future has been built around control when the person he wants is also the person he is supposed to beat?
The first trailer offers the expected heat—competition, close-range eye contact, the kind of conversation that sounds like a threat until it starts sounding like an invitation. But the romance has a sharper setting than a locker-room fantasy. For Sacha, desire does not arrive outside the game. It walks straight into the part of his life where every point is recorded.
Winning is a family business
Sacha has spent years training with his father. That detail gives the film its real tension: a match is never just a match when someone else has invested their dreams in your body. The rival does not merely threaten a trophy. He threatens the tidy story Sacha has been told about who he is and what all this work is for.
It would be easy to pitch this as tennis’s answer to Challengers or Heated Rivalry. The comparisons are already doing their rounds. Yet the premise is more specific than a sweaty genre mash-up: one young man has been taught to treat longing as a distraction, then finds it looking back at him from across the court. That is a far more delicious problem than simply choosing between love and a trophy.
Fashion photographer Pierre-Ange Carlotti directs his first feature, with Guillaume Canet, Benjamin Voisin and Catherine Deneuve also in the cast. Carlotti knows how to make a glance feel indecent without showing very much at all; the trailer’s job is to turn that visual charge into a reason to care about the people inside it. The score comes from 070 Shake and Johan Lenox, another sign that this film understands atmosphere as more than an accessory.
Beckham’s surname will get people into the conversation. Kircher’s Sacha is the reason to stay in it. The trailer suggests a film less interested in the novelty of a celebrity playing queer than in the unnerving moment when a player realises he cannot win by pretending he feels nothing.
Forty Love opens in French cinemas on November 25, 2026. An international release date has not yet been announced. Until then, the score is still love-all—and neither man looks particularly interested in playing it safe.
