Tennis is not a sport that lends itself to cinema. The tension in this game is all about the moments of silence between points, and continually hitting a ball with a racket across the screen isn’t exactly exciting entertainment. But Luca Guadagnino in ‘Challengers‘ found a suggestive starting point: a tumultuous love triangle in which the game is an allegory, secondary to the story which, although apparently based on three tennis players, actually talks about characters who play love as if it were a game, to move forward and reap the fruits they desire.
Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) is a former women’s tennis superstar whose competitive days ended with a traumatic knee injury. Once she reluctantly and angrily gave up playing, she became a coach, leading her husband Art (Mike Faist, the protagonist of ‘West Side Story’) to a profitable career. But in recent times a series of defeats have undermined his fame and self-confidence so that Tashi decides to enroll him in a minor tournament to make him win and thus interrupt the chain of failures. Here, however, Art ends up opposing Patrick (Josh O’Connor from ‘The crown’), former friend and tennis partner but also ex of Tashi with most of the film structured in flashbacks that jump back and forth in time, exploring the exasperating power that frustration has on us and the intricate relationships between these three people who they have complicated feelings, each towards the other two but also together with each other.
Just a few weeks ago Celine Song’s ‘Past Lives’ arrived in theaters based on the triangle between a South Korean woman in the United States, her American husband, and an old childhood love rediscovered by chance. And it’s really curious that Song’s real American husband, Justin Kuritzkesis the screenwriter of ‘Challengers‘ where he tells us about another love triangle that mixes sex and sport finding in Luca Guadagnino, whose films have often been based on desire, be it cruel and petty, or desperate and hungry (see ‘A bigger splash‘ , ‘Call me by your name‘ or ‘Bones and All‘), the most congenial director. For many of Guadagnino’s characters, desire is a reason for being and the driving force of their narrative arc. In the screenplay this type of desire is a weapon used by the three protagonists with audacity and in a manipulative manner, so that the alignment between director and screenwriter finds a definitive reason for being.
The simple conceit of ‘Challengers’ is that every conversation is a tennis match and every tennis match a sex scene with emotions expressed through frenetic dialogue in some moments and a silent and sensual physicality in others, because everyone here chases sex and success by fusing the two together in a shamelessly provocative way. With Tashi taking the lead, rightfully furious that she has frustrated her ambitions and cruelly angry at all the men who have the courage to continue playing the game that was taken away from her. She is hungry for affection and at the same time withholds it, by turns sensually curious and coldly impartial, ambitious and exhausted, conflicted and self-assured.
Thus, in an environment today on the screen that is culturally squeamish about sex and politically repressive regarding the recognition of female autonomyChallengers ends up being a provocation, a true erotic film as it understands that the engine of desire is fueled by both what we are denied and what we can consume, a sports drama about ambition and seduction in which sex is openly one of the major stakes but at the same time one frank tale of how sensuality can undermine relationships as much as cement them. A rare modern-day sexy adult drama and – like life – a brutal game of winners and losers.
