‘Challengers’: Love-All in Luca Guadagnino’s Grand Slam

Few filmmakers ever commit as hard to the promises of their own stories as the virtually inimitable Luca Guadagnino. Even before the creation of the Oscar-winning Call Me By Your Name — still by far his most popular work to date — films like A Bigger Splash and I Am Love were strong demonstrators of a filmmaker in full control of comprehending the intricacies of romance, intimacy, and the power dynamics that ensue. His maverick Suspiria remake, immediately followed by the romantically ghastly Bones and All, would serve as further demonstrations of the violence often inherent in love in its most extreme forms — whether that be exercised through harrowing exercises and abuses of power over others, or the inextricability of violence in subcultures whose way of love is often rejected by the world around them.

Guadagnino’s latest outing, Challengers, could not be more fundamentally different from the horror films that most immediately preceded it. By any metric, it’s easily his most accessible film, riveting with every single narrative step it takes, and nominally less indulgent in extremity, sexual or violent, than anything that’s ever preceded it in his filmography.  But the indisputable eye that Guadagnino has developed for pushing cinema to its limits, whatever those limits may be, now takes on a more technical and narrative form. His collaboration with sui generis playwright-turned-screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, as well as a newfound penchant for the most immersive technical challenges he’s ever taken on in his career, leads to Challengers morphing into what is handily Guadagnino’s most entertaining film — so totally high-octane and engrossing in its tale of manipulation, and of how addictive the chase after the unattainable can be.

Kuritzkes offers a dizzying, yet constantly suspenseful, nonlinear structure throughout the entirety of Challengers, whose story rockets back and forth between past and present with the exact force of the ball ricocheting between Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) and Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) — two tennis players on different career levels pitted against each other in the finals of a low-stakes professional challenger tournament. It’s a game that’s, beyond either of their awareness, been set up by Tashi (Zendaya), who we find out has close connections to both of these players; in the present moment of 2019, she’s Art’s wife and coach, trying to motivate him out of a recent losing streak, and as we find out when the film spirals over to the past, she was once Patrick’s girlfriend. Tashi’s domination in professional tennis, even from an incredulously young age, made her an absolute celebrity 13 years prior in 2006 — and it’s one factor that led Patrick and Art, erstwhile inseparable friends, finding themselves hilariously near-drooling and falling head-over-heels for the confident and madly attractive Tashi.

Their first encounters with her are at an Adidas-hosted nighttime afterparty for the U.S. Open — all three of them having triumphed in their respective games and divisions — where they both attempt to court her to apparent success after great effort and patience on both their parts. Later that night, in Art and Patrick’s hotel room, Tashi dares the both of them by playing on their desires — whoever wins a singles match between them gets to date her — and then deviously ekes out information of Patrick and Art’s attraction towards each other that had sneaked out slightly when both of them were younger. Seconds later, she slides out of a three-way kiss between all of them so that Patrick and Art are utterly consumed in intimacy with each other without their knowledge, something they only realize once their eyes finally open.

Before the desire on all ends pouring out in this scene, however, there’s a moment preceding it where Art, Patrick, and Tashi share a shoreside conversation about what tennis as a game exactly means to them, and Tashi has an insanely clarifying answer for both them and the audience — “Tennis’s like a relationship.” It seems like a relatively tacky metaphor in the moment, but as Kuritzkes and Guadagnino unfurl the tapestry of this story from this point onward, this statement turns out to be a crystalline summation of Challengers, whose interest in the literal intimacies and push-and-pulls of a relationships are completely eschewed in place of driving tennis up as the hottest, steamiest, most intimate possible aspiration for three people who have never known anything outside of this game their entire lives. And the moment of surprise intimacy between Patrick and Art that ensues, alongside the manipulation from Tashi that designed it, is just the second half of this summation; this is the story of two prospectively bi-curious colleagues playing games with each other to court the attention of someone who’s dead-set on playing and manipulating them to the best of her ability, in order to find out which among them is the fiercest competitor that she can call her own. All are in pursuit of the unattainable — Patrick and Art for Tashi’s affection, Tashi for a worthy competitor in a partner — and thus begins Challengers’ web of ambition, romance, blood, sweat, and tears.

As the relationships between these three characters unfold so that Patrick becomes Tashi’s boyfriend during the trio’s time playing tennis in Stanford University, there’s a dynamic that becomes clear in that Tashi is always looking for someone willing to satisfy her through a shared craving for tennis, and absolutely nothing else. It hardly matters whether that satisfaction be found in the opponents she faces, who she respects even despite their apparent racism, or in her interest in partners who are willing to let her be their coaches — even regardless of the way that ends up going, once Tashi finds herself coaching Art herself throughout all of his professional accomplishments and turning him into an all-star champion after a gnarly turn of events in Stanford. And in turn, that spirit of competition and the romance inherent to Tashi’s perception of the game transfers over to Art and Patrick’s every interaction in the 13 years leading up to the fateful challenger match; both in the ways they both continue to compete for Tashi’s attention and affection throughout their entire careers, and find themselves competing against, taunting, and goading each other in every form you could possibly conceive of. To people who have known nothing but tennis all their lives, what is competition if not just another form of love, another kind of relationship?

Any traditional definition of romantic or sexual intimacy is reframed and conflated with just about everything that has to do with tennis, which is presented with substantially far more eroticism with any of the explicit acts of intimacy that themselves go interrupted or more chastely than one might expect. To that end, Guadagnino, cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, and editor Marco Costa create an experience that’s itself steamy in its immersive cinematic construction, teasing the audience with three extreme-close-up shots of our three protagonists even before the logos of the film emerge, engaging in foreplay with the employment of slow-motion and jittered frame rates, before launching into full-blown arousal with the film’s final ten minutes, which aggressively launch a volley of shocking long-take POV-shots, impossible perspectives of the tennis court, and borderline impressionistic glances at our protagonists’ sweat-doused, nigh-Grecian physiques that’s hard to watch with anything but cinephilic-ally orgiastic awe and engagingly pulse-pounding excitement.

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s thumping techno soundtrack also doesn’t go the predictable route by having its up-tempo highlights solely play over the most intense moments of the film’s narrative — they also consistently kick into gear in even the film’s most understated moments. It’s just one of many ways that Guadagnino allows the audience to cue into the fact that tennis is an enrapturing, all-desiring hunger to be satiated through any means by every character in this film. Their every waking moment must be constantly consumed by the thrill of romantic competition, on the court or otherwise, and it’s seemingly Guadagnino’s mission to ensure that you, as the audience member, are the next target to be convinced of its power.

There’s a great irony to be noted in Zendaya starring in what just might be the sweatiest American film release of 2024, hot off the heels of the evaporative aridness of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two — the sheer steaminess of this film would have the Fremen scattered all across Arrakis mourning with great despair the catastrophic waste of such water. Challengers, and Tashi, by extension, present the opportunity for Zendaya to present what is so clearly her single best film role to date — allowing her to fully capitalize her status as one of Hollywood’s most swooned-after stars of her generation, while also chewing up the scenery with the sheer fierceness and determination of Tashi’s character, no matter the personal cost to her own body and conscience, or the cost it imposes on the men who vie for her affection. And speaking of which — it’s also quite impossible to praise and elevate one actor in this trinity of competition without simultaneously praising and uplifting the others, with O’Connor bringing the wryly cunning, constantly starved energy of Patrick’s character and sexuality into nearly every facet of his demeanor on top of his sense of underdog-driven competition, while Faist delivers the steeled intensity of Art’s determination and professional poise, itself still belying a sense of boyish charm and masculine craving to be recognized.

What a film of striking intensity, surprisingly covert eroticism, and engaging thrills Challengers is — a new frontier for Guadagnino that simultaneously defies every framework for depicting the nuances of desire that he’s established for himself over the years while also ramping them up to new heights. Few filmmakers would ever dare represent tennis with the degree of intimacy, dedication, eroticism, and simply sheer obsession that Guadagnino does, but by the time this Social Network-esque game of wits and manipulation reaches its absolute height, the realization of its sheer immersion, suspense, and sheer engagement is hard to ignore once it begins to pay off in spades. This is a film that benefits from second viewings and demands an intense amount of engagement from its audience, but Guadagnino and Kuritzkes effortlessly coast off of the promise of its narrative to deliver an implacably steamy, energized tale about the chase of the unattainable, and what parts of ourselves we compromise just to play the game of love and desire to its logical, sweatiest, most daring conclusion. By the time its final exclamation echoes over the theatre and Reznor’s voice croons over the credits, it’s not hard to imagine audiences finding themselves crawling back and simply begging for more.

Follow MovieBabble on Twitter @MovieBabble_.

Thank you for reading! What are your thoughts on Challengers? Comment down below!

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to MovieBabble via email to stay up to date on the latest content.

Join MovieBabble on Patreon so that new content will always be possible.