Starring: Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, Mike Faist
Director: Luca Guadagnino
Country: USA
UK Distributor: Amazon MGM
There’s two things you always know you’ll get with a film from Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name, I Am Love). Firstly, it will be an exceptionally well-crafted movie. Secondly, the film will likely be – even if just a little bit – gay. And in this film about a love triangle between tennis champions, the Italian auteur delivers on both fronts.
Tashi (Zendaya – Spiderman, Euphoria) is a budding tennis star on the verge of international stardom. At a youth tournament, she meets best friends Patrick (O’Connor – God’s Own Country, The Crown) and Art (Faist – West Side Story, Wildling) who both compete for her affections, but when she appears unexpectedly in their hotel room, a love triangle ensues that will impact all of their lives and their careers for years to come.
The narrative spans about fifteen years, skipping back and forth between the present – when Art is an international star and Patrick is a down-and-out failure – and the past, when Tashi is the name on everyone’s lips. The non-linear plot spices up the film’s format, for sure, even if it does feel arbitrary at times. We know from the start that the movie’s climax will be the match between the boys at the ‘Challengers’ tournament, which places un-seeded players against international stars, so the rest of its run-time is spent shading between the lines that are drawn clearly from the outset.
When Guadagnino took over the script, which had been on the Hollywood ‘Black List’ for years, he made his opinion clear that for a love triangle to truly work, “all corners need to touch”. Which is why what could easily have just been a film about two boys vying for the attention of the same girl morphed into something a lot more… bisexual. Its early twist – that the boys get it on too – has been splashed across the media, but it adds a whole other dimension to an already emotionally complex film. But that all boils down to one simple concept; that everything – including tennis – is about nothing else but sex.
The chemistry between them all is palpable, as the characters partner-swap back and forth across the years. They tempt, seduce, manipulate, avenge, dismiss and scorn one another from every angle and from every perspective. Their lives are so tightly woven together that the strands of their rivalry, love and hatred all become more important than they sport they are playing at an elite level. And though a lot of this is happening at a soap-opera level, it’s composed beautifully enough to make it genuinely compelling.
With striking visuals and a stylishly urgent soundtrack from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, this has the hallmarks of eminently average source material that has been elevated by a master of his craft. Even the matches themselves have been captured with the kind of frantic editing that would make Baz Luhrmann proud. What the film does prove is that Guadagnino is becoming almost a Kubrickian director who can work in any genre and style and beat genre directors at their own game.
Challengers might not be the tennis movie you expect, but it’s the tennis movie Guadagnino wanted us to see and we are totally here for that. Tense, sharp and extremely sexy, it tastes just as delicious as it looks.
UK Release: Out now in cinemas, released by Amazon MGM
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