Ready from 2023, it was released in cinemas on April 24th Challengers, a psychosexual sports drama set in the world of tennis. The cast includes Zendaya (also producer, with Amy Pascal having chosen her for the Spider-Man with Tom Holland) in the role of a coach ready to do anything to get her husband, a somewhat dull player, Mike Faist (West Side Story) and Josh O’Connor (God’s land, The Chimera), enemy/friend tennis players.
Patrick and Art, who grew up together playing tennis, are inseparable. When they meet Tashi, an athlete animated by the sacred fire of competition, a new competition begins between them, outside the playing field, to conquer her. She understands it immediately, however (before them), the real couple are the two chickens: «I’m not a homewrecker», she says, teasing them, but terribly serious, as she always is. Patrick and Art, however, fall at her feet, someone wins the “trophy” then lets it slip away, with some back and forth… Then Tashi gets injured, his professional career is over. Her sadistic nature thus takes over, she – unlike her suitors – is a real tennis player, not a player, she chooses the most masochistic contender and consequently lives her sporting dream through him, transforming him into a champion, or at least trying, and he, submissive, tries to do everything to satisfy her. “I love you,” Art tells her. “I know,” she replies, blankly. Years later the two (former) friends meet again on the tennis court, at stake are their careers, their future, their love for Tashi and everything she represents. Story and screenplay are signed by Justin Kuritzkes, playwright and novelist already working on Guadagnino’s next film, the big screen adaptation of Queer by William S. Burroughs. Fun fact: Kuritzkes is Celine Song’s husband, director and screenwriter of Past Lives.
The muscles that the director shows are those of his performers: Mike Faist’s ivory biceps and pectorals, Josh O’Connor’s abs and hairy calves, while Zendaya shows his bones, kneecaps, collarbones, shoulder blades. But, beyond the surface of the images, Challengers it is a muscular film in its nature, in its style, with a narrative structure built through a dense sequence of flashbacks and time jumps: the story snaps back, jumps forward, with a dense and bloody electronic musical counterpoint signed by the award-winning couple Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, formerly of Nine Inch Nails and two-time Oscar winner for Best Original Score (2011 for The Social Network and 2021 for Soul). To give shape to this sweaty, provocative and not without irony narrative, images of great rigor and composure alternate with dizzying subjective shots, the syncopated rhythm of the serves and backhands alternates with the immobile one that reigns in the hotel rooms and corridors, while the wind rages, turning the sports clubs upside down, songs by Patty Pravo, Blood Orange and Lily Allen bounce.
The history of cinema is full of love triangles (romantic and/or lustful), that of Challengers in particular it takes up and amplifies the classic scheme of those that hide a queer reading within them. The female presence, a ghostly femme fatale, is a conduit for the repressed desire of the two male protagonists, who experience their inspiration of erotic and amorous senses through the projection of shared desire towards the female body, which acts as a bridge. It must be said, a story as old as the clock, but always relevant. Playing with the same rules as Guadagnino, let’s take a step back, quickly passing through Guild (by Charles Vidor, with Rita Hayworth), and we arrive at Lubitsch. We are in 1932, it comes out at the cinema Four-way game, the adaptation of a brilliant comedy by Noël Coward. The story begins on the train, with the meeting between a couple of inseparable friends (Gary Cooper, Fredric March) and an effervescent and charming girl (Miriam Hopkins). While the two are asleep, shoulder to shoulder, with their legs stretched out on the seats, she sits down in front of them and begins to draw them, observing them as Tashi observes with a satisfied and slightly mischievous smile Patrick and Art, sitting among the his contenders while their tongues search for each other with slurps of great taste, now forgetful of the girl’s presence.
Lubitsch’s touch is all in the unsaid obviously, while Guadagnino’s touch is all in the way he manages to say, to show. The three then, in both cases, chase each other throughout the film, the two males compete to conquer the girl with a commanding attitude, she falls in love with one, with the other, together they are very good and then very bad… In the very modern ending of Lubitsch she chooses to be with both of them, to everyone’s great joy and in defiance of marital rules. In those years the Haynes Code had not yet come into force, comedies could still be lively, screwy and mischievous. The morality of censorship then descends like a cleaver to smooth out any subversive expression, but it will not be able to suffocate the desire, which will express itself with countless stratagems, between one frame and another. Guadagnino’s athletes, exhausted by a match played without interruption inside and outside the geometrically well-defined spaces of the tennis court, resume the dynamics of their love (romantic, toxic, castrating, energizing) from here, and the director goes further moreover towards a not dissimilar, but more ambiguous ending.
If Patrick and Art had made love right away we would have spared ourselves this whole story of psychosexual tensions punctuated by destroyed rackets (in the best Borg/Bertè tradition), acetate sportswear filtered by a fetishistic queer gaze, changing rooms and saunas impregnated with ‘genital disgust, recriminations from post-pubescent romances… But we would have enjoyed it less. Guadagnino is now playing a tournament all his own, with a cinema of exquisite and very solid technique, capable of not giving in to mere virtuosity or aesthete’s foolishness.
To get an idea of how much more art there is in Challengersand therefore of the almost scientific ability with which Guadagnino now “synthesizes” his cinema: Him and hera minor Cukor with the best couple ever seen on the big screen, Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy; Jenny the tennis playeran anime based on the manga by Sumika Yamamoto in which tennis becomes the driving force for a romantic melodrama of burning passions against the backdrop of exhausting training; Match Pointsmurder as a game to be played until the last point, a Woody Allen in great shape; The battle of the sexeswith Emma Stone in the role of tennis player Billie Jean King who in 1973 challenges the chauvinism of the sports system; Four-way gamea pre-Code Lubitsch classic that blesses the “tropa” as an element of harmony; Jules and Jimthe classic of Truffaut’s classics, in this case too the ending could have been avoided if the two male protagonists had walked around each other; Drama of jealousyEttore Scola with Age & Scarpelli at their best, Marcello Mastroianni, Monica Vitti and Giancarlo Giannini on the bed are just like Guadagnino’s three tennis players sitting together in the hotel room; Take the world and goanime based on the manga by Mitsuru Adachi, twins, baseball, young love and death that puts everything back into play; The DreamersBertolucci’s private 1968, while the revolution rages outside, inside vital, morbid and decadent impulses throb; Les Chansons d’amour, Christophe Honoré’s homage to French musical cinema (Jacques Demy) who saves Louis Garrel from the deadly mechanism of the triangle by throwing him into the arms of a young colt with very clear ideas. Etc. etc.
Challengers however, taking up the poetics of Guadagnino’s repressed desires, it seems to play on a less skewed field than usual for the director, almost reassuring in the classicism of its neurotic and predictable characters: on the one hand the sexually repressed male bodies and on the other the ghost of desire embodied by a frigid and nervous female figure. If the director had previously enjoyed pushing himself beyond the boundaries of the usual, to tickle the ambiguous charm of the unpleasant, after the great cannibalistic love of Bones and All, plays cleverly “on the downside”, with an impeccable film that focuses on high-quality packaging, but which, despite some itchy quips (“I’d get fucked by her with a racket”), stays away (for now) from the risk of exploitation. In short, once again Luca Guadagnino proves himself to be the most intelligent of contemporary authors, capable of flirting with pop, only winking at it, flattering, capable of dignifying the boredom of sport and the annoyance of sweat with sequences of great cinema, where his technical mastery (made of choice, reflection on languages, ideas: rare commodities today) excites more than feelings.
