I Am Love

My thoughts on Challengers

At a time when most films seem to go to absurd lengths to avoid even the slightest hint of anything smacking of eroticism and online comments sections are filled with people complaining about “gratuitous” sex scenes, I suppose it is a good thing that we have a filmmaker like Luca Guadagnino around to keep the hornier side of cinema up and running with a series of heavy-breathing works that have explored the sensual aspects of everything from infidelity (I Am Love) to cannibalism (Bones and All). The drawback is that the knowingly overheated directorial style that he employs in his work to invoke this sometimes tends to overwhelm the proceedings and make everything come across as borderline absurd. That is certainly the case with his latest effort, the heavily hyped Challengers, a film that clearly want to  do for the sport of tennis what Bull Durham did for baseball—use the game as a backdrop for the steamy and often-shifting interactions of a romantic triangle—but which proves to be little more than this generation’s Players.

As the film opens, tennis champion Art (Mike Faist) has been on an extended cold streak and is beginning to realize that he is aging out of a sport that, more than most, tends to thrive on the heedless energy of youth. Thinking that what he needs to get him out of his personal and professional ruts is an easy victory to boost his self-confidence, his wife/coach Tashi (Zendaya) signs him up to play in a second-tier tournament in the hopes that a win there will get him off of the tennis version of the schneid. By an act of happenstance—or is it?—his competitor turns out to be Patrick (Josh O’Connor), a veteran player who is also desperate to win in order to reverse circumstances that currently have him living out of his car. What makes this matchup especially tricky is that the two are friends from childhood, albeit long estranged, and he was also Tashi’s boyfriend back in the day and he still clearly carries a torch along with his racket.

As the match between Patrick and Art plays out over the course of the film—and, not to spoil anything, it is not one that ends quickly in straight sets—we are treated to an elaborate array of flashbacks that charts the changing relationships between the three. We see the first time that Patrick and Art—a couple of horn dog up-and-comers on the amateur tennis circuit—encounter Tashi, a genuine phenom who is destined for superstardom the moment she decides to turn pro. She finds the two intriguing and this leads to a long sequence in a hotel room in which she clocks both their obvious shared interest in her and their more hidden, though equally strong, interest in each other and manipulates the situation into something unexpected and unlike what the promotional campaign seems to be hinting at.

In the wake of this, Tashi and Patrick become a couple, leaving Art feeling a bit jealous, and Patrick decides to immediately go pro while Tashi and Art continue to play on the college level. These decisions inevitably do not play out as any of them may have wished and as the film progresses, we bear witness to the various twists and turns that eventually lead to the present situation in which the long-standing feelings of jealousy, betrayal and lust only add to the tensions of a match where the pressures increase with every hit of the ball.

In theory, the ingredients for a potentially compelling narrative are there and the three leads are certainly attractive and charismatic enough (and are reasonably convincing as tennis players, though I suspect much of their play was augmented by CGI) but despite all that, Challengers never comes together, either as a serious drama about three physically extraordinary but emotionally stunted people trying to negotiate tricky personal waters over the years or as a piece of steamy silliness involving hot people in tiny outfits getting it on in ever-changing configurations. The key problem is that the screenplay by Justin Kuritzkes is a disappointingly shallow construct that uses its elaborate structural hijinks as an attempt to cover up the fact that it has nothing much to say about anything. This becomes especially frustrating because there are points where the story seems to be flirting with digging beneath the sexy surfaces in order to dig deeper into the characters and their actions—such as Tashi’s feelings and frustrations about how her entire well-planned career narrative could come apart in a heartbeat—but then doesn’t really do anything with them. For his part, Guadagnino tries to pump things up and distract from the emptiness by going into stylistic overdrive—such as staging conversational scenes as if they were emotional tennis matches and layering everything with a score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross that quickly becomes more intrusive than anything—that culminates with a finale that is over-the-top even by his standards, coming across like an extended ad for a product you would never buy that ends up overwhelming the culmination of the drama involving the three central characters.

The other key problem with the film is that those characters, regardless of where they turn up in the roughly 15-year time span on display, are frankly shallow, annoying and ultimate toxic, both to each other and to themselves. That would not be a problem if the screenplay did this in a way that allowed them to be interesting despite their general unlikability but outside of a few isolated moments—most of them involving Tashi and the ways in which she manipulates people as a way to distract from her own problems—the script never makes them into anything more than impossibly pretty people with impossibly petty issues. This is an exceptional bummer since the three leads are certainly talented and charismatic enough to handle playing complex and potentially off-putting characters but not even their efforts are enough to make them or their interactions convincing as the film heads into increasingly implausible waters.

Watching Challengers is like watching a hot now sports phenom hitting the pro scene before they are truly ready—there is the kind of energy and sex appeal that looks good on magazine covers to spare but its grasp of the fundamentals is so shaky that it simply fails to live up to its potential. It huffs and puffs and grunts and sweats but all of its exertions are ultimately in the service of a story that is absurdly overblown, dramatically unconvincing and, at 130 minutes, far too long for its own good.