Ace
Luca Guadagnino’s porny, horny, disco tennis dramedy is all the movies and it. Is. Glorious.
Challengers
Director: Luca Guadagnino • Writer: Justin Kuritzkes
Starring: Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, Mike Faist, Darnell Appling, AJ Lister, Nada Despotovich
USA • 2hrs 11mins
Opens Hong Kong May 1 • IIB
Grade: A
The stories are true. Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers might just be the year’s horniest, porniest, gayest, bitchiest movie so far. Every feverish minute is worthy of just sinking into, and the best part is you don’t even have to know anything about tennis to dig it. To be fair, like all Guadagnino films it’s intensely subjective, and will either hit all the right notes for you or just come off as a pretentious, overwrought mess. Even as a fan, personally, he runs hot and cold. Suspiria was precisely the kind of remake that works, because it brought a modern story about power dynamics to a fundamentally strong story, and A Bigger Splash is a nearly flawless comedy of obsolescence. Bones and All, on the other hand, is very much not flawless. But the guy sitting next to me might beg to differ.
Challengers leans more into flawless, but it also leans hard into joyful entertainment, which has typically been a low priority for Guadagnino; he doesn’t really do “fun”. Essentially a love triangle melodrama, the plot pivots on tennis pros at various stages of their careers, who also happen to be romantically linked. From the second Tashi Duncan steps onto the court, where junior circuit US Open doubles champs Patrick Zweig and Art Donaldson can ogle her – and have her shoot their gaze right back – Challengers is all heaving chest sexual tension, carnal mind games and tennis ball metaphors. Trust us. It’s awesome. It also has a kicker of a final shot, whose validity and meaning may be debated for the rest of 2024.
Game on
There’s a rich double meaning to the title of Challengers. It refers to low-stakes, low-level regional tennis tournaments where nobodys hone their game and where pros rehab, or find their lost grooves. The film starts in 2019 with a Challenger tournament in New Rochelle, New York, which Art (Mike Faist, Riff in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story) is told by his wife Tashi (Zendaya, Dune, and man does bitch look good on her) will be a good confidence builder. He’s slumping, you see, and if he can get his act in gear he could win a Career Grand Slam. He’s gotten this far thanks to Tashi – who’s his coach as well as his increasingly bored partner. Also entered into the tournament is Patrick (a perfectly cast Josh O'Connor, Peaky Blinders) – Art’s former best mate and Tashi’s former boyfriend.
This, to put it mildly, is complicated. ’Cause back in 2006, when Art and Patrick were up-and-coming young players and Tashi was a hot prospect with plans to play for Stanford, they had a semi-threesome that revealed the true depth of Art and Patrick’s friendship, sort of, and the ease with which Tashi can bend people (specifically these two) to her will. In ’19 Tashi and Art are a brand-favourite power couple and Patrick seems to be down on his luck. Old resentments, lingering desire and unfulfilled ambitions are just a few of the hurdles the trio has to get over to get on with their lives. Art and Patrick are challengers for Tashi’s affections. Or not.
That’s the tip of the iceberg. The nonlinear storytelling (expertly edited by Guadagnino’s usual cutter Marco Costa) jumps around in time, gradually bringing us from ’06 up to New Rochelle, peeling back the layers of the three-way relationship along the way. The result is the some of the most gripping final 15 or 20 minutes of the year, in which clever tennis ball-cam views and transparent courts add to DOP Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s (Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s regular) sunny-sweaty images and build legit sporting suspense. A sudden make-out session in the middle of a storm is a little on the nose, but taken as part of the heightened emotions it’s the only option. And writer Justin Kuritzkes’s (director Celine Song’s husband) gives Guadagnino plenty of ammunition for his metaphors. Let’s put it this way: When Patrick says Art is “Playing percentage tennis, waiting until I fuck up” it has nothing to do with tennis. The often crackling dialogue is helped along by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s (Gone Girl, HBO’s Watchmen, Soul) propulsive, synth-heavy neo-disco techno score.
Everything about Challengers pulsates: Zendaya positively quivers with sexuality, O’Connor is very nearly the Platonic ideal of an Alpha male, and Faist – who may actually have the trickiest role to pull off – makes simmering, vaguely insecure desperation into an exciting wild card element. And somehow, some way Kuritzkes makes these deplorable people into characters you become invested in: Tashi’s manipulation skills are next level. Just when you start to feel bad for Art, he goes all petulant. When Patrick takes a verbal beating from Tashi you feel the sting – then remember he’s a huge asshole. It’s a high-wire act to be sure, but Guadagnino threads the symbolic needle effortlessly. Challengers is a film you experience more than just watch, but it’s a rare treat when the experience is a good time too. — DEK