Jumping back and forth through time with abandon, at first I found the structure of Luca Guadagnino’s much-anticipated Challengers to be off-putting. Then it hit me: It’s structured like a tennis match.
Now, I don’t know a lot about tennis and only have a cursory understanding of how it’s scored. But by the end of the film I was so deeply seduced into its world that I felt like an expert. Like Zendaya’s prodigy turned coach Tashi Duncan, I was plotting from the sidelines, desperate to jump out of my seat and grab hold of the racket.
The seduction of Challengers is plentiful with exciting sports movie sequences and even more exciting make outs. The Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross score pulses throughout, often giving casual conversations the energy of a match point.
As Tashi will say again and again, for her everything is tennis. Everything is a back and forth spar with her on one side and her opponent on the other. (She was never known for playing doubles.)
The details of our trio’s dynamics are best discovered within the film’s unraveling. Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Josh O’Connor are all so sexy and so sexy together — each individual, each pair, and all three with such different relationships and means of seduction. This is a true love triangle with desire volleyed in all directions.
Like Personal Best meets Merrily We Roll Along, the film sweats with lust and regret, the beauty of connection and the pain of connections’ fractures. The characters, especially Tashi, care about tennis and care about winning above all else. The film doesn’t approve or apologize for this perspective. Instead, it invites us inside.
As a career-focused Capricorn, I was easily seduced. But I still cackled with glee at just how willing these characters and the film was to assert the importance of winning. Of course, this mindset impacts the characters’ relationships to one another. And yet, true to Tashi, the film posits, would that impact be negative if they just fucking won?
In the end, we’re all winners, because we’ve been gifted a movie as fun as it is stylish as it is emotional as it is sexy. Zendaya commands the screen with no caveats. She’s not good with what she’s given (Dune) or good despite the mediocre writing (Euphoria). She’s just… good. No, she’s great. No, she’s the best. She’s so good in this role, it’s impossible to imagine anyone else playing it. She utilizes her celebrity as well as her acting talent to create a larger than life figure still human and recognizable.
Luca Guadagnino is better known for eroticism than explicit sex scenes and that is also the case here. But the foreplay is so good, it feels explicit. There’s something very queer about turning the appetizer of a kiss into a whole meal. The lack of explicit sex in Call Me By Your Name felt cowardly — here it increases the erotic tension. These characters can never quite hold onto one another nor the success they desperately desire so everything feels like edging. We’re led right up to catharsis only for the kissing to stop or the game to be interrupted by yet another flashback.
By the end, the catharsis finally arrives, but in a way you don’t expect. It’s the movie equivalent of a two hour steamy makeout that results in an unexpected orgasm. Or maybe it’s the movie equivalent of a three day tennis match filled with impeccable skill and inevitable exhaustion. Or maybe, just maybe, those are the same thing. After all, for Tashi Duncan everything is tennis.
Challengers opens in theatres on April 26.