Challengers (2024)
dir. Luca Guadagnino
Rated: R
image: ©2024 Amazon MGM Studios
Unlike Luca Guadagnino’s last effort, the unforgettable cannibal romance road trip movie Bones and All, his new film, Challengers, has very little in the way of graphic violence. The closest it comes is a wrenching scene depicting a torn ACL during a tennis match. Still, the emotional and psychological stakes underpinning this tale of elite athletes, insatiable ambition, and a fraught love triangle proves again how deft Guadagnino is at foregrounding human connection – and the messy emotions that come with it – no matter the broader subject matter of the movie.
One of the most exciting things about Challengers is its pinballing temporal structure. Much like the audience of a tennis match, our eyes follow the ball as it goes back and forth again and again over the net. The ball in this metaphor is the core relationship in the movie, and we watch it bounce back and forth over the decade-and-a-half in which the story is set.
This is the first screenplay from novelist and playwright Justin Kuritzkes. He is the husband of Celine Song, another new filmmaker who delivered 2023’s best love triangle movie, the splendid Past Lives. Challengers is the first of two collaborations for Kuritzkes and Guadagnino. The second, an adaptation of the 1985 William S. Burroughs novel Queer – which Guadagnino had wanted to adapt since reading it at age 17 – had its première last week at the Venice International Film Festival.
Like virtually all sports movies, Challengers builds to the climax of a final showdown. I won’t spoil it, but Guadagnino and Kuritzkes sublimely subvert the expectations that come with that setup to make the point that tennis isn’t the heart of the movie, no matter what the characters involved might want us to think.
The “present” of Challengers is the 2019 Phil's Tire Town Challenger tennis tournament. The two men playing against each other in the final are Patrick Zweig and Art Donaldson. As the film unfolds, we learn more about Patrick and Art’s relationship and their battle for the affection of Tashi Duncan, who, by 2019, is Art’s wife and coach. The two are also raising a young daughter together.
From here we whip back and forth, from the Tire Town tournament to the trio meeting in 2006, then back to a few weeks before the 2019 showdown, then to events in 2007, 2011, and myriad points in between. The temporal shifts of the movie can be jarring – in one bravura sequence, Guadagnino’s editor, Marco Costa, cuts mid-volley from one tennis match to another – but the filmmakers trust their audience enough to keep up without spoon-feeding us too much expository information. The varying hair lengths of the characters is all we need to lock into the time period of each sequence.
As with Bones and All, Guadagnino also uses subtle, almost periphery political and cultural markers to give each time period a sense of authenticity. One is a radio news report detailing a connection between former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and the firm Fusion GPS during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Back in 2006, we see teenagers Patrick and Art both simultaneously fall hopelessly in love with Tashi while watching her dominate an opponent on the court. There’s a delightful two-shot of the men in the stands as they watch the match. In tandem, both men lean back in their bleacher seats, in awe of the skill and passion on display. That evening, the trio are formally introduced before hanging out on a beach after a party.
During the conversation, Patrick tries to convince Tashi to keep the party going back in Patrick and Art’s hotel room. Convinced she won’t show, the two young men lounge in their unbelievably messy room when they hear a knock at the door. After a mad dash to make their room look somewhat acceptable for company, the trio continue to hang out and talk. Eventually the conversation turns to both Art and Patrick’s romantic interest in Tashi, and maybe in each other.
After a brief three-way make out session reminiscent of the climax of Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También, Tashi decrees that she will give her phone number to the winner of the match scheduled for the following day between her two new paramours.
Guadagnino and Challengers find glee in being cagey about the outcomes of situations like the one above. We don’t get to see that phone-number-recipient determining match, and, based on what we know about how the three wind up, the winner isn’t who you might initially expect. In 2019, we discover that Patrick, who decided to forgo college in order to go pro right out of high school, is struggling on the Challenger tour, where non-star players try to eke out enough wins to qualify for the major tournaments.
Meanwhile, Art and Tashi are a power couple who have parlayed Art’s success – he’s one championship win away from a Career Grand Slam – into a marketing and sponsorship empire. But Art has become disillusioned with his sport after the toll it has taken on his body, mind, and spirit. Because her own insatiable ambition on the court has been forever extinguished after a devastating injury, Tashi has given her all to make sure Art is a champion.
Tashi’s disgust at what she sees as Art’s weakness in wanting to leave the game could be read as the catalyst that conjures Patrick back into their lives, like the return of the repressed. Patrick only wants to win – well, maybe he wants one other thing – and Tashi’s relentless pursuit of success (and Art’s newfound reluctance) pulls her back into Patrick’s orbit.
Guadagnino assembled a talented – and, let’s be frank, hot – ensemble for his picture, with one of young Hollywood’s biggest and most captivating stars in the lead. As Tashi, Zendaya leads these two men around like they’re on leashes. The director’s real coup is in casting two slightly lesser-known actors as Art and Patrick. Zendaya’s white-hot star wattage, in comparison to her costars, is an excellent real-world metaphor for the way her character is the sun in Art and Patrick’s sky. She rules over them, and they are happy to be ruled.
After her turns as a high school student in the television series Euphoria and as Peter Parker’s love interest in the Tom Holland cycle of Spiderman films, Zendaya has proven she can take on more mature roles, especially when considered with her performances in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune films. There is no doubt that she will be a formidable presence at the box office for decades to come.
Josh O'Connor and Mike Faist (as Patrick and Art, respectively) both shine as the men hopelessly in love with Tashi. O’Connor – who portrayed a young Prince Charles in the middle seasons of Netflix’s The Crown – plays Patrick as a pompous fuckup who is nevertheless charming and adorable. Faist’s Art is a character honed for excellence on the court.
Challengers is far from being sexually graphic, but each love scene, especially the one that includes all three of our main characters, are steamy and memorable sequences. The intimacy created by the extreme closeup of Patrick and Art – Guadagnino uses extreme closeups throughout his film to build intimacy – as they munch on unmistakably phallic churros during a conversation isn’t one of those love scenes, but it might as well be.
As with Bones and All (and the upcoming Queer), musical collaborators Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have partnered with Guadagnino for the score. Reznor and Ross’s work in Challengers is, in a word, electric. The dark undertone to the music accompanying the beach scene mentioned earlier imbues the sequence with a subtext that would be completely absent with no score or with a more conventional composition. The power-synth stylings that the duo use in the tennis match sequences or other emotionally charged scenes is exhilarating.
CGI tennis balls and Guadagnino’s hyperactive camera movements make the tennis match sequences absolutely sing. The director goes full Raimi-cam in one bravura sequence in the movie’s final minutes as the camera takes on a ball’s-eye-view during one heated court exchange.
Challengers worships bodies in motion, both on the court and in the bedroom, and complicates that worship by centering on the sticky emotions that inevitably complicate both situations. As with Call Me by Your Name and Bones and All, Luca Guadagnino has proven again that he is one of our best filmmakers currently working in the realm of messy human emotion.
Why it got 4 stars:
- At its heart, Challengers is simply a well-executed, adult relationship drama with an intense sports chaser. I was caught up in both the romance and the stunning tennis match sequences from start to finish.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- Those opening super-slomo, extreme closeup shots of Patrick and Art are heaven. What a way to start a movie.
- There’s a certain dream-like quality to many of the transitions between scenes in Challengers. I’m an absolute sucker for that aesthetic and Guadagnino is one of the best at pulling it off.
- I loved the toss-off line about Spiderman. It’s so effective because the movie doesn’t make a big deal out of it. If you’re attention wavers for even a second, you’ll miss the reference completely.
- Many of the tennis match sequences, like the very first one we see, have a certain impressionistic quality to them.
- I was also a fan of the way that Guadagnino had his actors look right into the camera in moments when they are (in the world of the movie) looking at another person. That technique can go horribly awry, but in Guadagnino’s hands, we feel we’re even more a part of the movie than is usually the case.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Sad to say that I missed this during it’s theatrical run (I’ll bet those tennis matches looked incredible on the big screen), so I had to fork over some loot to Jeff Bezos (I just threw up in my mouth a little bit) so that I could rent it on Amazon Prime. Challengers is currently available for rent and sale on most streaming platforms, or for free with an MGM+ (more money for Bezos🤢) subscription.
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The FFC’s political soapbox
This is me imploring you to please, please, please watch the episode of The Daily Show in which Jon Stewart tackles the most recent Presidential debate. Stewart (with the help of his writers) nails our current moment. There’s something in the air. It feels like the tide is finally turning against Trump and MAGA, and their odious ideas and behavior. The episode was spilt into two segments for YouTube, and the second part, an interview with former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, is as good as the first. I doubt I agree with Ballmer on much, but he and Stewart together worked through some topics that give me hope that our current era of neoliberalism and austerity are coming to an end. I feel like we’re on the precipice of a new progressive era not seen since the New Deal. You can find the clips below; closed captioning is available on each clip:
The Daily Show 09/10/24 Part One (debate reaction)
The Daily Show 09/10/24 Part Two (Steve Ballmer interview)