‘Challengers’ is the Sensual Tennis-Based Love Triangle Movie You Never Knew You Needed
Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Josh O’Connor make beautiful tennis together in what might be Luca Guadagnino’s funnest movie.
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Critics like to credit directors as the bosses of movies, the main creative voices, which isn’t necessarily misplaced auteur theory, it’s mostly just convenient shorthand. Most of us understand that movies are a collaborative process, the creative forces that shape them too numerous to list and impossible to know. Suffice it to say, whichever exec at MGM decided to greenlight this 131-minute, mid-budget, kinda gay tennis movie starring Zendaya and two randos (relatively speaking) in the age of IP maintenance deserves a better parking space. It’s hard to know what’s better: getting to watch this movie or the fact that it exists at all.
Zendaya (Zendaya! – why do I always feel compelled to put an exclamation point there?) stars alongside Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor in what feels like the most committed-to-the-hilt movie adaptation of airport fiction since Gone Girl (if only David Fincher was as horny as he is meticulous). Maybe the craziest thing about Challengers is that it was actually an original screenplay, from Justin Kuritzkes, about a decades-spanning pan-sexual love triangle set in the world of competitive tennis – which Luca Guadagnino directs with a leering gaze one can only really get away with by being Italian.
It turns out to be something I never knew I needed, and Challengers feels like nothing so much as a massive ziggurat built entirely out of things I never knew I needed. Or perhaps our keenest observers of the human spirit have always been our horniest; Guadagnino sure makes it feel that way.
Faist and O’Connor play Art Donaldson and Patrick Zwieg, respectively, the WASP in the Uniqlo polo and the ethnic white in the sleeveless tennis tee (O’Connor is actually English, but his dark curly hair and the juxtaposition with Faist allow him to pass as one of us here). The action begins in the present day, with fading superstar Art, a Grand Slam winner, facing off against Patrick, a journeyman never-was who slept in his car because he couldn’t afford the hotel room, at a regional qualifier. Art is half of a tennis power-couple, alongside former prodigy and his current coach, Tashi Richardson, played by Zendaya (Zendaya!). But, as you might have seen in the trailer, and as we soon learn from a story that jumps around in time, the three have history.
In the next frame (or one of them, the frames are many) Patrick and Art are champion junior doubles partners just itching to get a piece of teen sensation Tashi Richardson. She’s not only the Next Big Thing in tennis, but, as Patrick tells it, “the hottest girl I’ve ever seen.”
When she struts out to the court and dominates an overmatched German, the two are practically tumescent. They manage to finagle a meet later that night, but Tashi already knows who they are. “Fire and Ice, right?” she asks, apparently their nickname. “Which of you is Fire and which one is Ice?”
Tashi probably knows, but the movie leaves the real answer up for interpretation. Patrick, the bolder of the two, eventually lures Tashi away from her overbearing parents (vague shades of the Williams family) for cigarettes on the beach. The trio flirt and talk, about what else? Tennis. Patrick and Art are scheduled to play each other in a singles match the following day. Patrick is favored. “He might beat you tomorrow, but you could be the better player,” Tashi tells Art (the WASPY one, if you’re having trouble keeping track). “Patrick doesn’t know what tennis is. He still thinks it’s a way to express himself.”
“What is tennis?” Patrick asks, in a slightly inscrutable smirk that O’Connor uses to devastating effect throughout Challengers.
“...Tennis is a relationship,” Tashi says, delivering what’s basically Challengers’ mission statement.
The three share a homoerotic, sort-of bisexual hookup later that night, and the question of whether Patrick and Art are genuinely bisexual or just so horny that they’ll fudge traditional boundaries provides plenty of dramatic tension to the movie that follows. Do they actually want Tashi or just each other? Does she actually want either of them, or just a tennis talent she can mold in her own image? What is desire, really? The questions echo as Tashi bounces between them like the proverbial tennis ball over the course of the next 15 or so years. The bisexual-or-just-super-horny question seems also to apply to Guadagnino, enhancing its attraction. Maybe it’s better not to choose?
It’s tennis! It’s sex! It’s sex-tennis!
Guadagnino shoots tennis like a high-class Eurotrash porno in what feels suspiciously like a feature film adaptation of the “Sex or Weight Lifting” sketch from Adam Sandler’s 1996 album What the Hell Happened to Me? Again, something I never knew I needed.
If Call Me By Your Name felt like a dreamy take on first love and Bones And All was a noodly picaresque about fine young cannibals, Challengers sings by never feeling like it’s grasping at profundity. It’s so locked into the hyper-specific logistics (and sensuality) of tennis and human attraction that it feels like a celebration of life*.
Isn’t that what life is, after all? The little details? If you truly want to enjoy life, maybe don’t spend your time mooning over its meaning or your place in a vast universe and just savor all the weird, wonderful, confounding trivialities. That’s ultimately what Guadagnino and Kuritzkes squeeze out of a peculiar little story about horny tennis kids: the innocence and abiding curiosity of youth. O’Connor, who seemed almost like a one-note actor going to the smirk well too many times when I watched the trailer, ends up nearly stealing the movie. He’s Challengers’ most compelling character, by virtue of having the glintiest eyes. He’s the one in on life’s grand joke.
Maybe tennis doesn’t have to be a metaphor for the universe. Maybe it’s just a metaphor for sex. And isn’t sex life, after all?
*Boners and All, he could’ve called it.
Challengers avoiding a title like “Love and Deuces” or “Double Fault” really is the triumph. That and the score being really good
Had a blast with this - if it had come out twenty years ago, it would have been paired with Cruel Intentions on cable for years, and I would have watched it every time.
I do wish it had been more sexy to me personally. The men that Luca Guadagnino finds hot and the men that I find hot are two separate circles. Neither one of these guys is bad looking, and the story works regardless. It's just... there are multiple scenes where I wanted to be screaming for them to kiss, and I was only thinking, ZENDAYA! is gonna spend thirteen years of her life fucking or pining for either of them? Come on.