Emotions run high in Luca Guadagnino’s smouldering three-way romance, which is bolstered by kinetically captured matches, writes Yasmin Omar.
Some athletes remain abstinent before a big game for fear of sapping their energy and diminishing their performance. There is little pre-match sex in Challengers, Luca Guadagnino’s hot-blooded, sweat-slicked sports romance – but not for that reason. The reason the characters in the film’s resolutely scalene love triangle stop short of getting it on is power. Tashi’s power, specifically. Doubles partners Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick (Josh O’Connor) are mesmerised by Zendaya’s once-in-a-generation tennis champion Tashi. Watching her wield a racket the way Michelangelo would a paintbrush, they are overcome by a wonderment that slackens their features into a doe-eyed daze. The first night they meet Tashi, she sits down on a bed in the boys’ shared hotel room, gesturing for them to join her. They scramble after her like salivating puppies at feeding time. Tashi smiles knowingly. She won’t sleep with either of them tonight, no, she’ll propose a wager: whoever wins in their head-to-head singles match tomorrow can have her number…
Challengers is full of games. Tennis games, naturally, but also mind games, power games, sex games. The film plays out across multiple timelines, starting in the present day (where Art and Patrick face off in a New Rochelle challenger tournament), screeching to a halt, hurtling back then zooming forwards again at irregular intervals. This volleying in and out of the past is initially disorienting, leaving you to parse whose stock is up, and, crucially, whose is down, in this dipping and spiking ménage à trois. Therein lies the brilliance of the structure. It throws us off balance and keeps us absorbed in the shifting dynamics of this steamy, jealousy-fuelled relationship. Screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes has nestled a number of repeated images into his script, so we can ascertain – from chewing gum spat into a waiting hand or strongly worded lunch dates in a cafeteria – which of the three is in the dominant pair at that moment (because, let’s face it, it’s always two against one).
Tashi invariably remains the triangle’s apex. Art and Patrick are breathlessly clambering to reach her, sometimes teaming up, sometimes tearing down. However much she enjoys toying with their emotions – and she definitely does, why else would she coo ‘I’m taking such good care of my little white boys’? – her singular focus is on her sport. Tashi’s fridge is stocked with electrolyte-replenishing drinks and her daily alarm is set to a punishing 5:30am. She can be playful and flirtatious, as evidenced by the mandatory romance-movie scene of a Character Dancing Like No One’s Watching, when in reality they are being closely observed by admirers – Tashi shaking it to Nelly’s ‘Hot in Herre’ mirrors the disco sequence in Guadagnino’s 2017 classic Call Me by Your Name.
Challengers (2024)
For the most part, though, Zendaya infuses her with a matter-of-fact flintiness. She has no patience for mediocrity, and her unsympathetic comments are as hard as aces smacking asphalt (see: ‘Get your fucking confidence back’ and ‘We can just be rich people if that’s all you think you can handle’). Tashi’s bluntness calcifies after the day that comes for every athlete: when the body gives out before the mind. A knee injury prematurely hobbles her ascendant tennis career, and the grunting force of her ambition. Zendaya shows us Tashi’s dream die in real time. It’s not, as you’d imagine, when she’s holding back tears, nursing her leg; it’s minutes before as she walks, head held high, the light extinguished from her eyes, knowing her fate is sealed.
It’s a cruel twist of fate that, of the three, Tashi is the one denied a shot at Grand Slam glory. Neither Art nor Patrick is as naturally gifted as her and, perhaps more insultingly, they don’t take tennis that seriously (both are smokers who resist waking up early to run drills). The doubles partners are known as Fire and Ice in a nod to their contrasting temperaments. O’Connor’s Patrick is swaggering and passionate, sexual magnetism rolling off him in cheeky grins and cocked eyebrows. Faist’s Art, meanwhile, is cooler, steadier, overcompensating for his lack of confidence with underhand tricks.
Challengers (2024)
Their costumes, designed by Loewe’s creative director Jonathan Anderson, further entrench their difference, with Patrick’s crumpled tartan shorts and ill-fitting vests clashing with Art’s crisp Wilson Ws and sharp-toothed Lacoste crocodiles. Plenty of onscreen love triangles shy away from exploring the homoeroticism of their male corners, but Challengers, being a Luca Guadignino film, would never dare. There’s a rhythmic synergy to Patrick and Art’s movements, an instinctual need to shuffle a stool closer or brush powdered sugar off a cheek, that often makes them more attuned to each other than Tashi. Flickering suggestions of desire spark between them, threatening to catch fire (take careful note of who sees the most action in the aforementioned aborted threesome).
Romantic yearning, and suppression, underpins the film. Most conversations about love – at practice, in saunas, in bed – are couched in sporting language, leading to the recurring refrain ‘Are we still talking about tennis?’, followed by a ‘We’re always talking about tennis’. The matches themselves, lensed by Guadagnino regular Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, are impeccably, surprisingly composed with a heart-in-throat dynamism. The camera somersaults and handsprings across the court: zooming down the net, peeking up at serves, sailing close enough to the ball that you brace yourself for impact.
Challengers (2024)
The filmmaker keeps up the energy by flitting between several points of view. There’s the ground’s, the ball’s, the players’ and even the camera itself, with beads of sweat dripping onto the lens in sensuous slow-mo. Guadagnino doesn’t shoot tennis in a conventional manner i.e. whip-panning across from one player to another. Where he does employ that technique is during arguments. In twinned fight scenes, Art/Tashi and Patrick/Tashi vent their frustrations to the beat of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ thumping techno score, as the camera whooshes back and forth between them. This visual reversal overturns our expectations, binding tennis and romance together even tighter.
Challengers’ central trio is governed by passion. Each of them, in separate fits of pique, slams their racket so violently against the ground that the strings snap and shards of plastic ricochet over the baseline. In this world of international, and interpersonal, competition, feelings cannot be contained. They must be unleashed in shrieks of pleasure, in curled fists of celebration. Liquid emotions reach boiling point and bubble over; a hateful spit in the face can, second later, ease into an impassioned make-out session. The film is enthralling in its turbulence. Its slipping and sliding from victory to defeat is as tense as anything you’ll see on Centre Court at Wimbledon this year.
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