Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist are the three cornerstones of the sentimental and sexual triangle told by the director through tennis (poorly shot, but captured in its essence of psychological struggle). The review of Challengers by Federico Gironi.
Probably many tennis fans (pre-Sinner fans, perhaps) will feel a little pain in their hearts or eyes when they see how Luca Guadagnino he shot some of the game scenes, favoring the aesthetics of cinema (the her aesthetics of cinema), to that of sport: but they will be able to draw inspiration from the way in which the director has captured the deepest essence of the discipline, that is, its being a psychological skirmish before a physical one. Like, love, like sex.
Coincidentally, in Challengers makes the character played by say Zendaya which is a tennis match, at its best, is like a relationship: it is therefore on the playing field that Guadagnino unfolds a battle that is sporting on the surface, sexual and almost existential underneath.
A playing fieldthat of Guadagnino, which is not only the tennis court, but also the cinema screenand which the director seems – pardon the pun – to have wanted to convey a lot camp.
Between bromance, male buttocks in plain sight, the widespread and waved talk of the cock as an organ and as a symbol, profuse sweating, ambiguously fraternal hugs and exchanges of tennis and non-tennis shots, bananas and churros eaten with exhibited and innocent ambiguity together, hands on the thighs and chairs brought closer continuously, as if to huddle together in something that cannot but translate into a final embrace, the relationship between Josh O’Connor’s Patrick and Mike Faist’s Art is clearly – and somewhat grotesquely – homoerotic from the very first minutes. Well before it manifests itself a little awkwardly in that kiss between the two, only half casual, which the film’s trailer cunningly omits.
Guadagnino he seems to have a lot of fun telling these two characters, and telling them in that way, even in theirs testosterone reaction to the homosexual kiss, which translates into the all-male and slightly macha anxiety of winning the same trophy: Zendaya’s Tashi.
A triangle, therefore. At the base, Patrick and Art, two stereotypical but functioning and functional male models: the hot and the cold, the self-confident braggart who however does nothing in life, and the good player who reaches the top of his sport but without joy, always insecure, without balls, castrated by a woman – Tashi, the top, in every sense – who is his wife, coach, manager. And perhaps, despite herself, also a mother.
Through somewhat daring jumps back and forth in time (especially at the beginning, since one is a little amazed by the fact that a player among the best in the world like Art is playing a challengera very minor tournament), Guadagnino proposes the stratigraphy of their history and their relationships: the decades-long friendship between the two, the meeting with her, who first chooses one and then the other, the unsaid, the secrets, the doubts and the fears. Above all, the trajectories of desire (more expressed than perceived), passing or crossing. Which are also the trajectories of domination, of power.
The only one who is never afraid, and who has had dominion in her pocket since the beginning, is her, Tashi. The woman.
If Patrick and Art are, each in their own way, two male figures who do not stand out for intelligence, maturity and autonomy, who at times are irritating in the frontal exposure of their respective defects, but who in any case never end up being truly unpleasant ( if anything a little pathetic), Guadagnino is not at all afraid to paint the portrait of a determined woman, of course, beautiful and talented, but so determined that she becomes calculating, opportunistic, unscrupulous, contemptuous. Here: certainly not nice, no.
I don’t know if the justification he comes up with at a certain moment is worth it, that he doesn’t have the time or desire to take care of two naughty white children. A joke perhaps bordering on gratuitous, given how and when it arrives. One doubts that only an openly homosexual director like Luca Guadagnino would have been allowed to film today a film so ruthless with, and how, its female protagonist. And above all to do it in such an enjoyable way.
And yet, if Challengers it works, in its being a Ultra-camp and ultra-glossy divertissement in which sporty and luxury brads alternate, full of stylized images, stylistic exaggerations and homoerotic winks, all seasoned with the pounding and enthralling electronic music of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, as well as for its desire to take itself a little seriously , it works because it has the courage to tell the story three characters who, with different shades of positive and successful, have nothing. Ultimately of three losers, each in a different way, and full of resentment, hidden under layers of control and repressed love.
And the three actors, with Zendaya also producing, all seem very happy and aware of this choice by their director.
Tags: Challengers Review
