“Challengers”, a sentimental triangle in the world of tennis

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Friendship, love, betrayal and… tennis: this is how “Challengers” could be summed up, the new film by Luca Guadagnino, which should have opened the last Venice Film Festival before the production, due to the actors’ strike, decided to postpone public screenings of the film, thus skipping the Venetian showcase.
At the center of the story there is a sentimental triangle with Tashi Duncan, a promising player in world tennis, who tries to seduce two tennis players who are friends of each other, Art and Patrick. After a serious knee injury, however, Tashi has to abandon the court and remains in the world of tennis as coach of her husband, Art. The latter, a world-famous champion and winner of various Slam tournaments, after some unexpected defeats is enrolled from his wife to a simple Challengers, so as to regain his lost trust. Fate, however, wants Patrick, Tashi’s ex-boyfriend, to also be enrolled in this tournament.

Two years after the beautiful “Bones and All”, a profoundly symbolic film in which cannibalism was transformed into a metaphor for a profound existential malaise, Guadagnino returns behind the camera to once again represent a particularly delicate period in the lives of the three protagonists. The challenge final of the tournament which sees the two friends/enemies against each other again is continuously interrupted by flashbacks that show us their adolescence and the subsequent stages that led them to compete once again on the playing field.

Sport thus becomes an explicit metaphor of life and their match the representation of a relationship marked by ups, downs and constant changes that have occurred over time within their relationship.

An audiovisual bombardment

Several passages of the screenplay are predictable and there is some excessive exaggeration, both in the narrative structure and in the stylistic choices, but Guadagnino knows his stuff and offers the viewer a real audiovisual bombardment with eccentric editing – continuous changes between passages frenetic and others decidedly more static, even with the use of slow motion – and supported by the pounding electronic soundtrack by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. The formal apparatus thus manages to make this ménage à trois in which Guadagnino looks to Bertolucci truly engaging, but at the same time manages to make his style increasingly personal and continues to convince, after the excellent results of “Call Me by Your Name” , “Suspiria” and the aforementioned “Bones and All”. Furthermore, the three protagonists Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor are credible, with the latter increasingly launched to become a real international star: the actor he will soon return to work with Guadagnino in “Separate Rooms”, an adaptation of the novel by Pier Vittorio Tondelli.

Confidence

Among the most anticipated titles of the weekend in theaters is also “Confidenza” by Daniele Luchetti, starring Elio Germano. The actor plays Pietro, a high school teacher who confides in a former student of his, with whom he has a tormented relationship, an unspeakable secret that binds them forever from that moment on. The love story between the two ends and their lives are divided. When Pietro meets Nadia, a woman very different from Teresa, the threat of the secret confided to his ex comes back to haunt him. The story is taken from the novel of the same name by Domenico Starnone: after “Lacci” (2020), this is the second time that Luchetti has adapted a book by the Neapolitan writer for the screen. “Confidence” is undoubtedly a controversial and divisive film, a film that alternates profound ideas with other more forced and superficial passages. It can fascinate and irritate at the same time, but in any case it is a product worth seeing, capable of interesting from the beginning to end and enhanced by the intense performance of Elio Germano in the role of the protagonist.