Challengers promised me a threesome.
Luca Guadagnino’s latest sells itself (and it’s sold itself very well, transcending the usual nicheness of Film Twitter and Letterboxd nerds) on the sexually charged love triangle between three young, hot, talented tennis players.
Challengers is book-ended by a match between the sexy scumbag Patrick Sweig (Josh O’Connor) and the tight-wound, snake Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), with an elegantly bored Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) looking at them from the stands. The complications of their relationship unfold in a novelesque structure of flashbacks to thirteen years prior, when they first met as college athletes. It was a time when Art and Patrick were tennis academy besties, animatedly biting each other’s churros. One glimpse of Tashi, then a tennis prodigy well set on her way to superstardom, became the tension rod between the boys. In flashbacks, Challengers reveals how Tashi toys with them, letting them compete for her on and off the court, briefly unlocking the sexual tension that has evidently always been there. She dates Patrick first, but for plot reasons, ends up marrying Art. On the surface, Challengers is interested in the ways that its lead throuple contort their desire for each other into a slippery power struggle. But it comes up mostly short, all build up and no pay off.
Guadagnino has said that he finds watching tennis boring (he is right), and for most of Challengers there is little interest in the sport itself or in making it visually exciting. It is not until the very last moments of the film that the tension and camera accelerate to dizzying levels. Fed up with realism, the athletic aggression, emotional history and sexual tension between Patrick and Art culminates in a rabid montage of sweating faces, tensing calves and ball’s-point-view shots that makes Tashi (and myself) finally perk up in her seat.
Guadagnino’s films have always been interested in bodies in different states of desire: in I Am Love (2009), it’s the illicit affair between an isolated rich housewife and a chef; Call Me By Your Name (2017), concerns the all-consuming first love affair of teenage Elio with an older graduate student; and, in Bones and All (2022), it’s the tentative coming together of two monsters, two young cannibals on the run. His films have excelled at cinematic foreplay, filling the frame with violent desire and painfully extending the prelude to a first kiss. He pulls off the same trick in Challengers. Both Patrick and Art want Tashi, while she wants to be the best. She prods and clarifies the tension between them with a kiss. In the viral moment, the young athlete sits between the two eager boys, kisses each one of them in turn, and then leans back, removing herself from the entanglement to observe the two lost in themselves. “The kiss is always a very dangerous moment,” he said about Bones and All. In Challengers, the kiss is a display of Tashi’s dominance and the beginning of the break in Art and Patrick’s relationship. A kiss intertwines them all.
The film is, or intends to be, built around Zendaya’s star power. In a film culture severely lacking in interesting faces, strong personalities and movie star potential, Zendaya is one of the few young actresses who seem to possess all three. She has mastered the red carpet (in partnership with her long-time stylist Law Roach, who she’s been working with since 2011). She made her name on television: first as a child star on Shake it Up and K.C. Undercover, and later on broke through playing teenage drug addict Rue on Euphoria. On the big screen, however, she has mostly been cast as the girlfriend: snarky M.J. to Peter Parker in the Spider-Man films, capable Chani to dessert messiah Paul Atreides in Dune, vulnerable trapeze artist Anne to Zac Efron’s wannabe circus-man in The Greatest Showman, the beleaguered girlfriend of a narcissistic filmmaker in Malcolm & Marie. In these supporting roles, she mastered the look of dignified hurt, of making her presence palpable in only a few scenes. Zendaya has always pulled us into her. She never disappears into a role, she shapes it around her. Challengers demands more of her. Tashi is her first leading role, and it is designed to be an arrival and a confirmation of a new movie star.
But Zendaya can’t quite grasp the bitterness of a tennis prodigy whose promising career is derailed by an injury. There are only hints at the anger of that power Tashi yielded so effortlessly dissipating, of being forced to watch others play, the resentment of moulding someone else’s career while being reminded of what yours could’ve been, the enjoyment she gets of controlling Art’s career as his coach. I can see that it’s written, but I don’t feel it in her performance. Zendaya is undeniable – but the film never lets go of “Zendaya” long enough to give us “Tashi”. Perhaps Tashi’s rough edges, the most fascinating ones, are too ugly to embody at this stage in her ascent to full movie stardom. Challengers cannot afford to lose out on a good fit in order to believably sell us that Tashi is a professionally, sexually and emotionally frustrated mother in her early thirties. Or that her ambition curdles into resentment towards Art, who has become a tennis champion on a losing streak and possesses none of that fire that Tashi had. The film hints at, but never develops, that their partnership is built not on love or lust, but on Art seeking out humiliation to propel him and Tashi’s desire to humiliate him in order to soothe herself. Neither does it disclose why Patrick’s athletic prowess and charm has underserved him so badly that he’s begging for food and banging Tinder dates so he can sleep in a bed instead of his car. Even with Art’s career on a downward spiral, and Patrick’s never having taken off, both of them are still circling around Tashi as though she is their centre of gravity. The film wants us to think that her interest can make or unmake them. She must remain, at least superficially, in power.
But what power does she actually yield? I found myself frustrated by the Challenger’s refusal to scratch deeper into the spiky mess of desire and ambition that unfolds between the three leads. None of the characters are granted interiority, only hints at one. Does Tashi settle on Art because she blames Patrick for her injury? Does Art move from Patrick to Tashi because he needs a Domme to order him about? Does Patrick keep coming back to Tashi as a way to keep circling Art? Would they all be happier if they just fucked?
Challengers’ entire publicity campaign hinges on sexual tension so rabid it would make any screen wet. And the downright feral reaction to it online (NSFW for most of its Letterboxd reviews) proves that it has worked to some degree. But it left me, ultimately, feeling cold. Challengers only comes alive when Art and Patrick are competing with one another, on the court or in conversation (or when Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor’s throbbing score comes in, often mixed so strangely that it overpowers the dialogue). The match that starts and ends the film is violent, rousing and thrilling to watch. So much so that I could (almost) forgive how long it took to get to it. There is, finally, something that inflames them. I get it: tennis is fucking and fucking is tennis. But Challengers never lets any of its characters win, or get off. They are suspended in an exhausting cycle of tension-building. Are our screens so sex-starved that we will accept sparks when we crave fireworks?
They would be happier if they all just fucked, and so would the audience.
Such an interesting point re Zendaya’s performance. I too found her somewhat unconvincing as a worn down wife and mother.
Re 3some I found myself having to reassure people who’d been put off by the trailer that there wasn’t a 3 some. What is wrong with these people? I’d probably have gone back and watched it again if it had delivered on that promise.