Film Review - Challengers
Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Josh O'Connor chew scenery in Luca Guadagnino's gripping sex-and-tennis melodrama
The tennis sequences in Luca Guadagnino’s new film Challengers are nothing like Wimbledon coverage. Featuring high angles, low angles, point-of-view shots, tennis balls passing through camera lenses, “impossible” camera positions (from the ground looking up, for instance), plus a plethora of sweaty closeups, not to mention a truckload of Guadagnino-esque fetishisation of the human bodies concerned in an orgy of slow-motion, at times this feels more like Raging Bull (1980). The sexual competitiveness, frustration, and aggression in every serve and smashed racket gives the film, particularly the finale, a singular tone likely to be parodied (especially in memes) to the absolute nth degree.
“It’s all about sex and sport. What else is there?” Thus ran the tagline for Bull Durham (1988); a tagline that could just as easily apply to Challengers. The plot deftly leaps between timelines, with best pals since childhood Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) and Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) winning the junior US Open Doubles tournament as high schoolers, circa 2006. Afterwards, they meet up-and-coming tennis prodigy Tashi Duncan (Zendaya). Both are attracted to her, but she says she’ll give her phone number to whoever wins their next match, in which they play one another.
In the present, Art is married to Tashi. She is his coach, and he has had a successful solo tennis career, but has yet to win the US Open. Art has also fallen out with Patrick, for reasons that gradually become clear as flashbacks are interspersed, detailing their time together at Stanford University. Thus, the scene is set for ferocious sexual rivalry and a tangled love triangle of melodramatic intrigue. There’s also more than a hint of homoerotic undercurrent. In fact, it’s more of an overcurrent.
Scenery is duly chewed, with all three leads giving terrific, immensely physical performances, both on the court and in the bedroom. Mike Faist’s Art is the more sensitive of the boys, but still fiercely competitive and determined. Josh O’Connor is convincingly arrogant and swaggering as Patrick, but it is nonetheless clear just how much Zendaya’s Tashi has got under his skin. As for Zendaya herself, she’s an astonishing force at the heart of this film. It would be easy to portray Tashi as a one-dimensional, ruthlessly ambitious, inadvertent friendship-divider, but Zendaya imbues her character with moments of vulnerability and pain amid her (often well-intended) manipulative machinations and scathing putdowns.
At times it feels faintly ridiculous, but one cannot help but get swept up in it all. Justin Kuritzkes’s screenplay may have a few longueurs, but Guadagnino imbues the film with so much passion that overlength doesn’t feel like a problem. Even the ludicrously protracted finale, which bizarrely reminded me of both Barry Lyndon (1975) and Warrior (2011), doesn’t register as indulgence. Instead, it’s utterly gripping.
Is Challengers Guadagnino’s best film to date? Possibly. Or at least, it’s between this and Call Me by Your Name (2017). At any rate, Challengers could well go on to receive Oscar nominations. In the meantime, this comes with my recommendation, and a final note that Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s thumping techno score perfectly compliments the drama.
(Originally published at Medium.)
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So is this meant to be the sporting film equivalent of Francois Truffaut's "Jules And Jim" (or Paul Mazursky's Americanized version of that film, "Willie And Phil".)?
I can't wait to watch this one! I've read elsewhere it's "Saltburn but tennis" and I loved that one, so sign me up. Now I'm off to Google the definition of "longueurs." Another ace review Emperor!