Directed by: Luca Guadagnino.
Written by: Justin Kuritzkes.
Starring: Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Josh O’Connor.
Runtime: 131 minutes.
All’s fair in love and tennis in Luca Guadagnino’s sexy ‘Challengers’
Love? It means nothing in tennis. Zero points scored. But on the tennis court in Luca Guadagnino’s “Challengers,” love is everything. Or if not love, at least the game of it.
And Tashi Donaldson (Zendaya) treats love and sex like any other competition, ruining men’s lives for sport and having them thank her for the pleasure. You’ll thank her, too, if you meet “Challengers” on its sexy, silly terms as three extraordinarily beautiful people play an intricate game of power and pleasure behind the tennis match that unfolds onscreen.
We meet Tashi and her husband Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) on a downswing. The First Couple of tennis, self-proclaimed “game changers” swanning around in designer duds and slinging ads for Aston Martin, are on a decline. Art is the championship-winning tennis star and Tashi, whose own tennis career was sidelined by a catastrophic knee injury, is his merciless coach, both on and off the court. But their tennis supremacy is on the line as Art suffers a crisis of confidence, unable to get out of his own head and secure his spot at the next Open.
What he needs is a confidence boost, an easy victory to change his momentum, which is how the champ finds himself slumming it at the New Rochelle Phil’s Tire Town challenger, a piddling qualifier for has-beens and never-weres, far beneath the typical notice of a player with an Aston Martin sponsorship.
His opponent, the louche and lanky Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), should be easy pickings, a washed-up poster child of squandered potential sleeping in his car and playing in ratty shorts that look like they were dug out of a dumpster by a possum. But Patrick is hardly a no-name easy mark; it turns out the two have a history. Art has everything to lose – and Patrick, nothing.
“Challengers” doles out its character backstories in a tennis match punctuated by flashbacks showing Tashi as a Stanford-bound phenom on the court, a maneater who reduces then-best friends Art and Patrick to love-struck putty in her callused hands as they vie for her attention – a “homewrecker,” Tashi calls herself as she treats the besotted boys like a pair of Ken dolls she’s playing with on her bedroom floor. And just like Ken dolls, she can even make them kiss, if the fancy strikes.
The thing to understand about “Challengers” going in is that it is a deeply unserious movie, like if you combined the sexual adventurous and homoerotic undertones of “Y tu mamá también” with the sado-masochistic codependency of “Phantom Thread,” but made it goofy. Guadagnino’s penchant for ravishment – romantic in films like “Call Me by Your Name” and “I Am Love,” horrifying in “Suspiria” and “Bones and All” – is rendered ridiculous on the tennis court.
The question is whether or not “Challengers” has the self-awareness to know its own ridiculousness. You’ll be tempted to take it all deadly seriously; the characters certainly do. Especially convincing is Faist, whose screen-commanding turn as Riff in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” was no one-off. But given the film’s thumping, synth-heavy score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the Looney Tunes tennis ball POV shots, and lingering close-ups of Art and Patrick suggestively eating bananas and churros in each other’s faces, it’s hard to conclude “Challengers” isn’t in on the winking joke of itself.
Just sit back and enjoy the match.
Barbara’s ranking
3/4 stars
