A comedy with an almost competitive sporting background, lucid and polished which cleverly winks at the romantic twist
We hope no one is offended if you say Bernardo Bertolucci in Challengers we can’t even find a toenail. For goodness sake, no one is obliged to recall or be inspired by anyone. What is certain is that after reading the world of Italian criticism (the American one, fortunately, does not drag these burden-paradigms with it) it seemed that the scene seen in the trailer, that of the Zendaya-Mike Fiast-Josh O’Connor love triangle on her bed, it was a sort of tiny precursor to a desire and an exhibition of libertarian bodies and emotions that would then explode in the film. Instead, and again no one is offended, that scene is perhaps the most clumsily bold (mystery about the US censor’s R, i.e. accompanied minors under 17…) because Challengers of blood that boils in less noble parts produces just a few crumbs, indeed instead of a murky Bertoluccism dangling here and there it seems to want to run up and down in terms of time and model sense “secret of my success” to Michael J. Fox of the eighties.
A comedy with an almost competitive sporting background, lucid and polished which cleverly winks at the romantic twist. Tennis (on hard court), rackets, balls, beads of sweat on the athletes’ foreheads and muscles a very light menage (apparently) a trois between two tennis players who are former friends (or perhaps never enemies), their prey (certainly predatory) and the everlasting sporting ambition. Nowadays during the first exchanges of final of an ATP Challenger tournament, the champion in crisis Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) meets his eternal rival and, indeed, friend since he was a teenager on and off the fields, Mike Zweig (Josh O’Connor). On the sidelines, in the front row, dressed like Grace Jones in 007, there is Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), also a very young champion, career interrupted by a shattered knee on the pitch, today Art’s wife and coach, yesterday Mike’s girlfriend. But to understand the grimaces of that little face shadowed in the audience we have to roll up a long, fragmentary, even chaotic flashback, which takes us back to 15 years earlier where Art and Mike were laughing while winning on the court, and in doubles, like tightrope walkers. In their eyes, however, only the light of their colleague Tashi shines. Here, to reconfigure the weight and direction of Challengers However, we must stop here because this is basically the crossroads from which the film never glides. Because the way Art and Mike look at Tashi is like that of a child who desires an object – a ball or an ice cream – and not how they desire a human being on a carnal level.
In reality, Challengers is more successful if read as a coded, karst and semi-hidden homoerotic relationship continually postponed between Art and Mike: the throwing and ostentatious destruction of the rackets, the immeasurably expanded use of a sense of competition that is actually sublimated, playfully accepted, indeed never experienced in an oppositional way (we won’t tell the ending, but it seems like a comical gimmick between the mockery of Billy Wilder and Woody Allen). So that the real fury, in turn emotionally aseptic and a little sterile, is Tashi himself who wants to guide professional careers and love lives as a scientist would in a laboratory. In short, if Challengers it lacks erotic pulsations and thrills, but it shows once again how Guadagnino is a filmmaker stylistically a thousand kilometers ahead of his Italian contemporaries and serenely in the Hollywood fray a bit like Muccino did more than twenty years ago. Together with the director of photography Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, the Palermo filmmaker chooses a curious and peculiar path, for example, in reconstruct matches on the pitch, providing a frontal solution of the energetic and lively camera with respect to the tennis players, which divides the court in two, leaving aside the (complex) realistic lateral reproduction (TV shot model) of the sporting gesture (a forehand, a backhand, etc.) . Look that in some moments of competitive intensity it overturns and melts in subjective shots of individuals under the skin, even reaching the performative gamble of the subjective shot of a tennis ball traveling through the air acting like a mad protagonist.
