“I don’t watch tennis,” Luca Guadagino, director of “Challengers,” told Little White Lies. “It’s boring to me.”
A little white lie indeed: “Challengers” is one of the smartest, sharpest and sexiest films of the decade, making tennis — even to the most averse of viewers — sizzle with the salacious heat of sweaty, salivary scandal.
Following a non-linear storyline with a structure like “Oppenheimer,” “Challengers” follows Tashi (Zendaya), Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick (Josh O’Connor), three tennis players fatefully intertwined, professionally and romantically, throughout their lives.
The film opens at the narrative end, with Art and Patrick competing against one another as middle-aged men in the finals of a Challengers match — the second-highest tier of tennis competition — with Tashi, now coach to Art after a knee injury, watching uncomfortably from the stands. It’s very, very clear that something is awfully wrong.
“Challengers” slowly reveals its cards like a Russian nesting doll, seamlessly switching backward and forward in time from college days to the current match and the days and weeks before to reach a jaw-dropping climax. From the start, you know that Art and Tashi end up married and filthy rich. They’ve excommunicated Patrick from their lives, and he is forced to live paycheck to paycheck, sleeping in his car. And with the flair of a Shakespearean tragedy, Art and Patrick used to be one of the best doubles teams — best friends and model masc bros — in the nation. The film teases out the mysterious why in slow doses, racketing the tension to an all-time high.
The film works with this odd framing because the genius plot structure by writer Justin Kuritzkes — married to Celine Song of “Past Lives,” making them the powerhouse couple of the decade for writing messed-up relationships — never affords one player in the main trio the chance to hold the ball for too long. Kuritzkes denies the viewer the pleasure of picking a clear romantic or moral winner in the love triangle, slowly doling out information that relentlessly deconstructs the observer’s view of who has the upper hand.
The editing is its own player, reflecting the back-and-forth head turns of watching a game from the stands. The film makes insistent use of jump cuts in lieu of long takes, making the sparse moments of focus shine with metaphorical brilliance.
Director Luca Guadagnino pushes himself to new heights here, post “Bones and All” and “Call Me By Your Name,” playing with the camera in ways new to his craft. There are point-of-view shots from the players, cars, the tennis court and the tennis ball itself; the picture is often in slow motion or moving at a reduced frame rate for theatrics; the plentiful mix of wide angle and close up body shots, with sweat sometimes literally drenching the camera lens, effortlessly enhances the enthralling blocking.
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ score steals the show with an electrifying mix of dry drums and harsh, wobbly synths that sound like an EDM disco club where the liquor endlessly pours. The tracks, loud and brass and backed with soft whispers and auto-tuned vocals, amplify the dialogue to make even the most intimate conversations cinematic spectacles — and make the big moments barrels of dynamite.
In fact, pause before the match point. Let’s not beat around the bush: This is a love triangle where all corners touch.
“Challengers” is a visual narcotic for bisexuals, with clips that are bound to make the internet wild savages for a business month at minimum. Yes, the men kiss — a three way tongue takedown with Tashi, and solo too — and the homoerotic tension of sideways smirks and sauna showdowns is enough to kill anyone unconvinced that at its core, male sport always toes a rich theoretical line between brotherhood and lust. Even the food choices, like Patrick’s fiend for eating Art’s churros out of his hand close enough that he can smell the cinnamon and get the powder doused in his hair, leave little room for speculation.
The film, however, never explicitly depicts acts beyond kissing and foreplay, turning the tennis court into a voyeuristic and thrilling bedroom to settle debts. In Art and Patrick’s desire to win over Tashi’s love and admiration, they become bound by mutual obsession, their fights communicated in exasperated and high-pitched grunts and secret racket movements as they volley the ball over the net.
“Challengers” tonally knows its limits — come on, now, this is a bizarre movie — taking ample opportunities to poke fun at itself. The script is relentlessly funny, and every moment of absurdity is quite simply too good to spoil here.
Zendaya, in particular, rips through this movie’s script like a starved lion looking for raw meat. “I’m taking such good care of my little white boys,” Tashi spits in a particularly wild and unbelievable third-act moment, a line delivery that was already an all-timer pre-release but a hundred times better in context.
O’Connor and Faist, closely in tow, are electric. Faist’s marvelous past stints in “Dear Evan Hansen” and “West Side Story” are no match for this career best, and O’Connor transforms into a force of nature that threatens to jump out of the screen. These boys might just break teenage hearts not seen since Timothée Chalamet’s breakout in his own Guadagnino joint. If this trio does not sweep award nominations this fall, something has gone horribly wrong.
The last 15 minutes of “Challengers” are perhaps one of the most memorable ending sequences to a film in years, pure lightning that will leave you dazzled with an adrenaline overload. Even though the film foreshadows and closely choreographs each move, watching it all crash and burn is a cathartic pleasure. One shocking decision Tashi makes in the final stretch will undoubtedly polarize audiences — but that controversial move creates the ideal space for a powder keg explosion of a final scene where the drama wraps together in a perfect bow.
“You don’t know what tennis is. It’s a relationship,” Tashi tells the boys early on at a party. “It’s like we were in love. Or like we didn’t exist. We went somewhere really beautiful together,” Tashi says of a match partner earlier in the day. What a dull game it must be to not know your opponent as your own.
