Challengers
Welcome back Luca Guadagnino. I missed you. If you’re unfamiliar with this Italian director’s name I’m not surprised but maybe you’ve heard of some of his work? Call Me by Your Name? I Am Love? If you follow the movie world closely these films were unmissable events as they were glimpsed at festivals before making their way to wider audiences. Call Me by Your Name was a huge and infamous hit back in 2018. It did so well in fact that it gave Guadagnino a blank check by most studios to go out there and make them another box office smash. Those hits didn’t come though. He followed up CMBYN’s success with a remake of the Italian horror classic Suspiria. He followed that with a coming-of-age cannibal drama Bones and All. Neither were successful or frankly, all that great. All of my favorite work from Guadagnino came before CMBYN. I Am Love and A Bigger Splash preceded CMBYN’s sweat drenched ideas of love and loss and all three form a pretty excellent trilogy. What I’ve learned from Guadagnino’s successes and failures is that despite his talent, the man needs movies where he can revel in the raw emotions of his characters. His last two films had to focus too much on arthouse violence and gore to really allow him to home in on what really gets his blood going, the things we do for love.
What’s funny is the moment in his new film Challengers that I knew the Luca I’ve grown to love might be back involves a shocking bit of body horror not unlike what’s on display in Suspiria: a knee injury suffered in the line of duty by one of its three tennis-playing protagonists. This split-second bit of cartilage busting brutality registers more powerfully than anything in his last two films because of how close to the emotional arc of all three main characters it lands. Written by novelist Justin Kuritzkes—and inspired as much by Serena Williams’s infamous rage-drenched 2018 U.S. open loss to Naomi Osaka as by such polyamorous classics Jules and Jim and Y Tu Mamá También—Challengers arrives as a proverbial “movie for grown-ups,” which is to say it’s a study of sexual power and frustration without a superhero in sight.
Unlike most of Guadagnino’s filmography, Challengers feels like commercial entertainment as opposed to an art film. The camerawork by Thai master cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom features numerous CGI-assisted shots in which tennis balls scream past our eyeballs at warp speed, as well as point-of-view shots from the perspective of the ball itself. During one key love scene, in order to underline the stormy nature of the feelings on screen, Guadagnino conjures up an actual storm that results in one of the best visual dramatic sequences I’ve seen in years.
Challengers runs 131 minutes but moves swiftly thanks to the ace editing by Marco Costa. The cutting has to be clever in order to complement the screenplay’s structure, which serves and volleys its way through a 13-year timeline to chart the formation—and mutation—of a seductively symbiotic (and dysfunctional) three-way relationship whose participants are all equally in love (and hate) with themselves and each other. In terms of chronology, things begin with a meet-cute: soon after ascendant future singles superstar Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) meets junior doubles champions Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) and Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) at the afterparty for the U.S. Open junior championship, she invades their hotel room and starts pushing their buttons. After coaxing the boys into some mutual fooling around—sitting up straight like a line judge between her groping suitors—she proclaims that she’ll consider dating the winner of their upcoming one-on-one match.
“I don’t want to be a homewrecker,” Tashi says before she goes, but that’s exactly what she wants to be, and not just because it turns her on. An obvious prodigy with Serena-sized ambitions, she’s drawn to talent, and senses that Patrick and Art are too cozy to get the best out of themselves. Since the characters are all ego-stroked up-and-comers exploring their adult emotions—and their perfect, precision-tuned bodies—such naughty manipulation is all in good fun, a night to remember when they’re older. Cut to the present tense, though, and the trio’s mixture of intimacy and solidarity has exploded, along with their respective personal and professional aspirations. Both men have had a crack at dating Tashi, with Art managing to stay in her good graces as a long-time partner—but only because her own career has stalled. Patrick, meanwhile, has fallen off the map, only to strategically resurface at a podunk tournament where he vows to be a thorn in his old pal’s side. Suffice it to say that questions of winning and losing look very different in one’s 30s than in one’s teens, and that the same competitive spirit that drives people toward greatness can also plunge them into misery.
Defeat and disarray are qualities squarely within O’Connor’s wheelhouse. Here, he inhabits Patrick’s impulsive nature with just the right amount of self-deprecating humor, as if he’s amused by his own running tendencies toward sabotage. Muscles bulging and eyes gleaming with appetite, he’s the ideal foil for Faist’s slender, soulful Art, who’s too anxious about his talent (or lack thereof) to ever consider becoming his own worst enemy: where his rival laughs off encouragement, he thrives on it, but never seems fully satisfied by the results. Each man is, in his way, a sitting duck for Tashi, whose supreme passion is not for sex, but tennis—a sport whose pounding back-and-forth nature offers the only plausible outlet for her pugnacious stamina. Watching the young Tashi stalk around the court in between points is like National Geographic channel footage of a predator in action.
With Tashi, Zendaya could finally have the beginnings of a serious acting career on her hands. There are scenes that work beautifully, like the early make-out routine, which vibrates with sly, deadpan eroticism. I don’t like speaking negatively about films I’m reviewing so I’ll leave it here: Zendaya does terrific work with a very simply written character. If anything, it’s the screenwriting that lets her down here but there’s true talent on display and I can’t wait to see her sink her teeth into a truly meaty role in the future.
It’s clear the script has a sharper focus on the boys. This would be fine if Challengers were as attuned to the rituals of male rivalry as, say, Ron Shelton’s White Men Can’t Jump—still one of the great American movies about competition, and one that uses sports as a kind of divining rod to tune into larger cultural frequencies. That movie shows us, time and again, how basketball contains multitudes: it’s a showcase for fashion; a melting pot for racial tensions; a series of contrasting and complementary philosophies. Challengers tries to make the same all-encompassing point about tennis—a thesis that frames life (and love) as a series of hard, hostile volleys, and reduces the world beyond the court to a blur. In purely kinetic terms, the climactic tennis match here may be the best-executed scene of Guadagnino’s career, surpassing Suspiria’s grotesque ballet recitals. This film won’t go down in history as a classic but I believe it fully succeeds at what it sets out to do and the result is a movie as engaging as a great game of tennis.
