If unfamiliar with acclaimed Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino ( “I Am Love,” “Bones And All,” “Call Me By Your Name”), know that the director is a serial romanticizer, prone to driving cinematic sensuality with the likes of secret lake frolics, peach masturbation, and crying by the fireplace in the Italian countryside. However, for his steamy new film, Challengers, viewers get a hotel view of the windy New Rochelle, New York, as a dizzying decades-long love triangle collides for what is the final showdown in the grandiose style of a random tennis challenger final.
Starring Zendaya (“Euphoria,” “Dune”), Mike Fiast (“West Side Story”), and Josh O’Connor (“God’s Own Country,” “The Crown”), Guadagnino’s latest love conquest takes on the professional tennis world in what’s a game, set, match within the film’s first minutes. From the three Hollywood elites alone, their fan base demographics harbor internet-ridden youths who would gasp over the film’s boy-on-boy makeout session, and Guadagnino himself is also partly fascinated by pretty people working up a sweat. Such beauty spills into the trio’s on-screen chemistry, elevating their entangled romance that borderlines a bisexual threeway into softcore eroticism, a necessary precursor to their individual victories with an exclusive “mother” masterclass from Zendaya, who famously says, “I’m taking such good care of my little white boys.”
As the movie opens in 2019, stylish tennis prodigy-turned-coach Tashi (Zendaya) coaches her multi-Grand Slam champion husband, Art Donaldson (Faust), through his morning workout. Despite her career retirement, Tashi is forever in game mode (even during sex), which makes it hard for romantic relations to survive if the person isn’t a member of her fan club. So, in layman’s terms, if Donaldson is winning, Tashi is still the unbridled victor. Therefore, his current losing streak is a major attack on Tashi’s self-righteous reputation and even cause for marriage tension, freezing Donaldson’s approval-seeking “I love you” with a cold “I know” from the coach-wife. To moreso repair Tashi’s wounded ego, she enlists Donaldson in a tennis challenger with a last-minute wildcard: Donaldson must verse against the washed-up pro athlete Patrick Zewig (O’Connor), his ex-best friend and Tashi’s former flame.
Two-odd decades earlier, the now-adversaries were champion doubles partners, inevitably retiring their “best friend” status after falling for the same woman, Tashi. Years pass, and a marriage to Art later, Tashi is seated net-center in the ex-friends’ challenger final, but, this time, they are playing for her heart instead of scoring her phone number. All three actors, in their own right, deliver dynamic performances that, although not as graphic as Tashi’s knee injury, also unearth their characters’ weaknesses, whether hidden between lines of dialogue, or within Donaldson and Zewig’s secret racket language.
The challenger itself is no more than 10 minutes of screentime, the rest of the film’s watch time devoted to the trio’s complicated history, time capsules of wins and defeats (both on and off the court), which intensify the present-day smackdown. These recounts are fresh off the racket, firing back and forth between time benchmarks, and forcing viewers to reorganize the tortured trio’s decades-long complications, re-identify the team worth rooting for, and, moreover, not blink. Even with novelist and playwright Justin Kuritzkes on deck, Zewig’s tongue-in-cheek comment of “tennis is boring” during his faux-Tinder date is an amateur scriptwriting mistake that inadvertently breaks the fourth wall. Be as it may, Kuritzkes and Guadagnino perform a tennis miracle with viewers watching the two-hour film with bated breath over the next betrayal and backstab, courtesy of Tashi.
Part of what makes Tashi’s ever-present vigil over the friends-to-foes match so engrossing isn’t so much the history etched into her forehead’s worry lines but the film’s techno-inspired original score. Composed by Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and frequent collaborator Atticus Ross, the duo transformed every bead of sweat, glare, and contorted muscles into a sultry Calvin Klien commercial that is one inch too close to a circuit party.
Reznor spoke to Variety about the director’s guidance with the score. “Luca said, ‘What if all the music was driving, thumping techno, like a heartbeat that makes the movie fun?’” Reznor and Ross previously contributed to Guadagnino’s “Bones & All,” and also share credits in “The Social Network,” “Gone Girl,” and Pixar’s “Soul.” Ross added, “It’s about the excitement, and simultaneously, there’s an order and a thoughtfulness to the score.”
From the electrifying bass synchronizing with Tashi’s darting eyes on the speedy volleys, the score also humanizes her rare moments of despair atop her hotel ottoman, accompanied by composer Benjamin Britten’s beautiful operatic “Friday Afternoons Op.7: A New Year Carol’’ performed by Choir of Downside School. Even the opponents’ racket-destroying moments add an element of harsh musicality, a melodic note reverbing the individual’s motive to win: Zewig needs the money to take him to the next level; Art needs to save his reputation or, in other words, his marriage; And the egotistical Tashi needs to choose the boy with more promise, once and for all.
While Guadagnino handles a horrible greenscreen moment of Tashi’s grown-up sweaty suitors standing near her center-courtside position, cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (“Call Me By Your Name”) makes up for the misstep with a tennis-ball camera operation that bounces between the ex-friends until viewers are motion sick and too dizzy to understand the film’s final moments.
To a Guadagnino fan, Challengers first appears as a cinematic diversion from his usual world of unrequited love; however, Variety’s statement on the film echoes a very literal term of endearment that bridges such gap: “Anyone who’s ever played tennis knows the game starts with love and escalates fast.” For the Italian filmmaker, love is always the takeaway theme, and in Challengers, professional tennis is the conduit that drives his disjointed love story through an anthology of the trio’s past and present relationships. The resulting turbulence is, for better or for worse, an endless volley between Tashi, Donaldson, and Zewig, who are once again all together like the good ole days, and it’s that nostalgic serendipity that dulls even the sole winning incentive of challengers. It’s true the film may lack the director’s signature melodramatic splendor seen in the colorful, slow-burning “Desire” film trilogy, but Challengers is a monstrous whirlwind of drama that’s well within Gudagnino’s wheelhouse of erotic romanticism and, with three A-list heartthrobs on its roster, is a guaranteed dopamine hit for the new generation.
Leave a Reply