“It was really tough to make the movie,” she said Sunday. “In one way, it was easy because the French federation gave me carte blanche, but we didn’t have the access like in Klein’s era. Klein is in the locker room. He’s in the massage room. Ilie Nastase smokes. Chris Evert cleans her own skirt.”

Maillet said she had tried to get comparable access, “but it was as if people didn’t even understand the concept intellectually.”

Viewed back to back, Klein’s film and Maillet’s are true bookends, reflecting all that has been lost and gained as professional tennis and big-time sports have become ever more ubiquitous yet ever more out of reach.

“We have shut off the sound,” Yannick Noah, the French star, says wistfully in Maillet’s film.

All of today’s sports agents should take a two-hour break from texting to screen “The French” and consider what exactly it is that they are saving their clients from.

As a viewer, I found myself thinking, They really let Klein in there to film that? And yet I also found myself thinking, This is real; I can truly relate to this, and above all to them, certainly to a degree that I never approach working through another ghostwritten article in The Players’ Tribune in which an athlete speaks “directly” to the people with a rich vocabulary and polished syntax that bear little resemblance to the voice of that player I once interviewed.