Outside of boxing, the thrill of most sports is hard to translate to cinema but, even within this context, tennis has always been notoriously tough to make pop in a movie. It’s a bit counterintuitive, really – like boxing, it’s (generally) a one on one duel, where the participants grind each other down, body and soul, until only one is left, coated in sweat and glory. With Challengers, Luca Guadagnino finally manages to make tennis work on screen – by turning it into slick, salacious combat; half gunfight, half sex-scene, all ridiculous excitement. The matches here, instead of feeling like ‘Sports Movie’ obligations, form the fast-beating heart of this clever, stylish, and just oh-so-goddamn thrilling love triangle drama that leaves absolutely everything out on the court.
Our players here are Tashi (Zendaya), Patrick (Josh O’Connor), and Art (Mike Faist), three rising tennis stars who we follow, through a pinging non-linear narrative, from ages 18 to 31. Patrick and Art, friends since they were 12, are both good, but Tashi is on another level, a new Serena Williams or Maria Sharapova in the making, at least until a horrific knee injury cuts her career short. Meeting at a party after all of them have just won junior championship trophies, this trio swiftly embarks on a three-way relationship that, one by one, will bring out the absolute worst in each of them as they grow up and apart.
Guadagnino and writer Justin Kuritzkes do an incredible job in immersing us in these relationships, both in the grand (and supremely sexy) stuff like a sex-scene in a car in the middle of a raging windstorm and in the little details. Small and particular expressions of intimacy shared between Patrick and Art become the love language of Art and Tashi before Tashi and Patrick do the same thing again. These granular displays of affection keep a real warm soul of love in Challengers throughout, even as romance turns to bitter and obsessive competition – it’s also a really funny film when it wants to be, Kuritzkes’s script particularly good at conjuring wildly witty and cutting insults.
The cast reward this A-grade material with electric performances, a fizzing chemistry shared between all three of them. It’s easily Zendaya’s finest acting to date, jumping between brittle and brutal, while Faist finally gets a chance to prove that his extraordinary breakout in West Side Story was no fluke, and O’Connor is just sensational as a slutty and shameless cynic who hides his keen emotional perceptiveness behind a carefully constructed façade. They’re a captivating trio made all the more magnetic by Guadagnino’s filmmaking, power plays and earnest longing captured in sensual close-ups.
After the slightly more removed dark grandeur of Bones and All, Challengers finds Guadagnino on insanely kinetic form, his reunion with Call Me By Your Name and Suspiria DOP Sayombhu Mukdeeprom giving him some real swagger. He’s always making his cast look as gorgeous as humanly possible, whilst the tennis itself is absurdly thrilling. Guadagnino pulls out all kinds of tricks, from first-person views to the camera becoming the tennis ball itself, swatted between the players (there’s also some stuff where shots are just fired straight at the camera in a way that made me actually flinch, a remarkable feat).
Add to that the cracking sound design that make each hit sound like the crack of a pistol and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s thumping, house music-esque score and the whole thing feels like you’re in the midst of dancing to a great DJ set. The atmosphere created is almost like a party gone wrong (though Guadagnino pulls back from the edge of embracing total chaos) that, even though the vibes are getting darker, you really don’t want to leave.
Running at just over two hours, Challengers absolutely whips by, pure entertainment from minute one all the way to an absolutely heart-in-mouth finale (there’s one particular moment that had pretty much my entire cinema screen Lock In to the action as we all realised where it was going). Walking the line between being a ‘they don’t make ‘em like this anymore’ old-school romantic star vehicle and something entirely more 2020s, it’s grown-up yet endlessly propulsive, craft-forward yet entirely populist, the kind of movie everyone should be continuously crying out for, one that sends you back out into the world with a pep in your step and fire in your heart.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 