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Luca Guadagnino, the director of Call Me By Your Name, Bones and All, and new movie Challengers, knows two things with certainty. As Janelle Monáe also says in her song 'Screwed': "Everything is sex, except sex, which is power." Challengers is the latest film in Guadagnino's body of work to echo that mantra, but, this time, the director goes down a different path to reach his destination, swapping cannibals and lazy Italian summers for professional tennis as the backdrop for his latest dabblings in sexual politics.
The movie is just as much about tennis as it is about the love triangle between its three key players – Tashi (Zendaya), Art (West Side Story's Mike Faist), and Patrick (The Crown's Josh O'Connor) – and it's on the tennis court rather than in the bedroom that the trio's passions and betrayals play out. Tashi is a former teen prodigy who had to abandon her dreams of playing professionally after a career-ending injury and now coaches her husband, Art. He has the career Tashi was once destined for, but a little less drive and, after a string of losses, Tashi signs him up for a low-stakes challenger match in small-town New York State. The idea is that an easy win will boost his confidence and put him on track for the US Open – that is, until he ends up across the net from Patrick, his ex-best friend and Tashi's ex-boyfriend.
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A series of flashbacks fill in the gaps in the trio's relationships and we watch their burgeoning tennis careers move in tandem with their emotional and sexual connections: progressing, stuttering, falling apart. The sport functions as the perfect backdrop for desire – when Patrick and Art play against each other, kinetic, sensual match scenes hone in on pounding hearts and bodies dripping with sweat as they anticipate each other's next move. Spectator sports have never felt so intimate.
Match point
Everything is sex – and power – after all, and Tashi has the upper hand from the get-go. Patrick and Art first encounter her, aged 18, at a Junior US Open party after they watch her play, spellbound, earlier in the same day. Their desire is juvenile and almost comical to begin with; when Art and Partick watch her play, they almost look like they're in pain, in the way that any kind of unattainable crush feels like a continuous blow to the stomach (but, like, in a fun way).
Flattered and amused by their admiration, Tashi humors their advances and her first kiss(es) with the boys are on her terms. She makes the pair fight for her continuing affections, too: whoever wins the final the following day will get her number. Suddenly, their unattainable crush is within reach – but only to one of them. "I'm not a homewrecker," she jokes, that first night in the shabby motel room they share. Patrick and Art are completely at Tashi's mercy, and they like that – until they don't. She's smart and driven in a way that neither man is, which, initially, is what attracts them both. When reality sets in, though, her ambition proves a little much for both of them, in different ways. She's single-minded in her passion and drive on the court and neither Patrick nor Art really knows how to deal with that.
There are no explicit sex scenes in Challengers. Everything – other than some enthusiastic making out – is implied, including nudity, but that only helps rather than hinders the film's undercurrent of sensuality. There are some important scenes in bedrooms – and one particularly steamy altercation in a windswept parking lot – but everything always comes back to the tennis court. Every look and touch is charged, aided by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' energetic techno score, which conjures images of pulsating, heaving bodies on a dancefloor. Patrick and Art's relationships with Tashi and their friendship with each other are entangled in their sporting performances, knotted like a tense muscle. Ultimately, they can't separate their heads from their pounding hearts, no matter how many hours they spend training.
Revelations of betrayal come to light on either side of the net and relationships are made and broken with rackets in hands. The movie begins and ends on the tennis court, but so does the tangled mess of Tashi, Art, and Patrick. Tashi can't envision a life without tennis, and Art and Patrick can't envision a life without her.
Challengers arrives in cinemas on April 26. For more on what else you should be watching at the cinema, be sure to check out the rest of our Big Screen Spotlight series.
