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‘Nasty’ Review: Ilie Năstase Pop Doc Is An Ace, But How Halcyon Were Those Days? – Cannes Film Festival


HBO & Max's new documentary about Romanian tennis great Ilie Nastase succeeds as a portrait of an era, even if it struggles as a portrait of a man.

Năstase and his contemporaries brought finesse and genius to the game, but tennis hadn’t yet been fully corrupted by corporate greed and mechanical elite athleticism. In the doc, McEnroe recalls a particularly tense match between himself, the young upstart, and Năstase, an established player who had become the first world number one on the institution of the ATP rankings. Romania’s Ilie Nastase complains of racket tension during his Men’s Singles final match at Wimbledon against American’s Stan Smith in 1972.

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