CHALLENGERS
Dir. Luca Guadagnino

2024

Theaters, PVOD 5/17

Tennis is, from a purely aesthetic perspective, the greatest popular sport. The outfits are chic – the courts are attractive in their clean lines and colorful floor. The sound a tennis racket makes when swung through the air, that beautiful “whoosh” of the netted stringbed is haunting and ethereal – the sound of a tennis ball colliding with a racket is a resonant “thwock!”, that dull thud both recognizable enough to track the ball’s movement and yet quiet enough to never pierce the ear. That’s not even to account for the classic tennis grunt – some people find this obnoxious and even unsportsmanlike, but I find it human, characterful, and honest about the extreme ardor of the sport.

That tennis grunt is essential to the soundtrack of Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, with Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) and Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) sighing and shouting over the heartbeat Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross techno score. We do get practices and drills absent the soundtrack of, according to Reznor, “Unending homoerotic desire,” but the definitive soundscape of Challengers is that of a rave hookup. It might be Reznor and Ross’s best work – the shock of its juxtaposition with the subject matter quickly gives way to allowing the editing to create a film that could not exist any other way.

Challengers is a tennis love triangle between Patrick, Art, and Zendaya’s Tashi Duncan, three of the most immediately iconic film characters in years. The truth is, the less you know going in, the better – you can wrap this paragraph, and then I’m sending those who haven’t seen it yet home. It is a deeply tense interpersonal drama, intensely erotic, very very funny, and psychologically thought provoking. Throughout the film, plot developments and character choices had me gasping, hiding my eyes behind my hands, and sweating like I needed a towel. The performances are three starmakers. And the collaboration between director Luca Guadagnino, cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall Past Lives, Beckett, Memoria, as well as Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name and Suspiria) and editor Marco Costa (Guadagnino’s previous film, Bones and All) have created a visual landscape that operates both within intelligent traditional storytelling and extremely adventurous visual games during the centerpiece tennis matches. Go see it on the biggest screen you can.

SPOILERS FOR CHALLENGERS PAST THIS POINT

I had read many descriptions of Tashi Duncan as America’s leading fujoshi going into the movie, but I actually don’t know if I submit to that reading of her character. Tashi certainly has a fetishistic streak, and the makeout scene early in the film indicates she’s just as happy as a voyeur. But I think, broadly speaking, it’s more that she has a fixation on vulnerable intimacy. However, she doesn’t have the social capability of turning off the monomania about tennis – tennis is where she is capable of making those intimate connections, and she cares more about that kind of communication more than she ever dares to think about off-court relationships. Getting these two “friends” to have this moment of wanting something more is the same thing she gets out of seeing that moment of “good fucking tennis” right at the movie’s ending. It’s why we don’t see her push to have them be in one another’s lives during the twelve years between Stanford and New Rochelle – her goal isn’t to matchmake. She loves these boys, but really, what she loves is a volley that breaks the walls down.

I love the way Zendaya plays Tashi – this character isn’t so far gone that she’s completely incapable of very normal and warm interactions, but she also has an incredibly low emotional threshold for weakness. She also utterly lacks boundaries when a fellow athlete comes into focus because, for her, the lack of boundary is why you play the sport. I love the way she plays the grief after she’s started to recover from her career-ending industry – I love the absolutely ridiculously self-satisfied face she makes watching the boys make out – I love the way she plays the intense anxiety of watching Art and Patrick play mean, awful tennis in the challenger final. Between this film, seeing Sydney Sweeney knock Immaculate out of the park, and Jacob Elordi smash Priscilla last year, I’m officially tempted to get on the Euphoria train despite the fact that it kind of sounds like one of TV’s greatest slow-motion trainwrecks.

I had already enjoyed Mike Faist in West Side Story, and had rejected Josh O’Connor’s Mr. Elton in Emma., so I’m not surprised by the bias I’ve landed on toward Art in the great debate of our time. I find it fascinating the way the class dynamics play out, with O’Connor always playing the low status despite Patrick’s access to upward mobility, with Art clearly having some money before stardom but also moving his mom in with him and Tashi to be with their daughter seemingly full time. Faist plays the insecurity of having been the second fiddle really wonderfully, and he plays the killer instinct of having claimed his own world with equal intensity. There’s a cocktail of “kinds of masculinity” discourse you can get into through close reading, but I like that Faist and O’Connor never let themselves be defined as “the good one” or “the bull” or “the rich one.” There’s so much nuance offscript to the way they’ve approached these characters – I think it’s really remarkable.

I love the decision to present this film in flashbacks surrounding The Big Game. Like Oppenheimer last year, I think it’s an absolute triumph in creating an emotional timeline that makes sense without becoming pat. I love that we see Art and Tashi’s daughter before we know if the kid is actually going to be Art’s – I love that we see the infamous serve gesture so early and then the Chekov’s gun goes off after we’ve seen betrayal (betrayal we can assume Art already knows about!) but with enough distance in the scene that we’ve moved on to another thought. There are so many cinematic decisions in this film I’m looking forward to sorting through over decades of watches and rewatches. It’s an instant masterpiece for me, and even though I’ve been working on another writing project you’ll get to see soon, I knew I wasn’t going to be entirely satisfied with a few sentences on Letterboxd. I’ll have more to say once I’ve gotten to see it again.