Mike Faist, Zendaya and Josh O’Connor form a volatile, hot and bothered tennis triangle
Challengers (2024)
In theaters
This movie wants to sex you up, and for many in the audience I think it will. Turned on or not, everyone watching will wonder what it might feel like to lay hands on the toned, rippling, libidinous bodies of the three leading players.
It would mean holding on tight. Which my eyes irrepressibly did, so relentlessly has the director, Luca Guadagnino, pumped up and prodded his actors in this hot, heaving sports drama.
Eroticism murmured warmly, longingly in Luca’s Call Me by Your Name (2017). This time he lets sex howl, devour, lay waste to lives, careers and dreams. You don’t just sit through this movie; you sweat it out.
We start at a 2019 tennis competition in New Rochelle, New York. In the opening shot we look up into the face of Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), a wealthy, celebrated tennis pro who’s lately been feeling shaky about his prowess.
He’s playing in a challenge match – where the winner just might gain a spot in the U.S. Open – that could determine his future.
The anxious heat he gives off feels more than athletic, as if it has a history of its own. Globules of sweat drip from his face onto the camera. Can furious serves and returns be the only reason?
In the fiery eyes of his opponent, Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), we see that something beyond the contest is eating him, too. A friend of Art’s since they were twelve, in recent years they’ve grown estranged.
In this current encounter, he’s also pouring sweat, his expression shifting from frustration to rage to an odd, impish humor.
With his muscles clenched, Patrick is clawing his way to a comeback after years as a down-and-out scuffler on the tennis circuit. Reinvigorated, he’s bent on dominating in this match – and beyond it. Payback nestles maliciously in his eyes, glistens in the smirking corners of his mouth.
Much more than the game hangs in the balance between these two men. Neither can help casting nervous glances toward the stands at the stone-faced Black woman seated in the mid-front row.
She’s Tashi (Zendaya), Art’s wife and coach, who’s been inspiration, sexual obsession and torment to both competitors since they first saw her play great tennis, when they were all in their late teens.
Patrick (Josh O’Connor) trying to revive his passionate connection with Tashi (Zendaya)
Challengers shows us how over the 13 years that followed that youthful encounter these three driven, drifting tennis freaks – the sport is nearly all they talk or care about – arrived at this desperate New Rochelle turning point.
Obsessed with winning, they remain unsure about which most needs their devotion: tennis or their blasted hearts.
Indeed “hearts” is the right word, not that it’s one they’d ever use. Their frenzied search for authenticity has jaded not liberated them, turned them cold.
Justin Kuritskes’ script insists that before these three can even imagine being their best selves, they’ll struggle for years as their not so nice selves. Deal with it, they say to the world. (We never see any of them with a friend.)
I’m no tennis expert. But I was spellbound by this movie’s blend of sports prowess and sexual allure. What’s bitingly reinforced here is that tennis isn’t a team sport; tennis players always stand alone, projecting, in the flesh, what they’re aiming for, the advantage they must gain in the moment.
Body, ball and racquet are ready-made sexual talismans, and Luca eagerly allows these actors to fuse lust with ambition. Zendaya, Faist and O’Connor seize the occasion and run with it. These are gloriously uninhibited performances that both tease and dare the audience to look away.
Luca has dared to try something that I don’t think mainstream Hollywood has attempted this blatantly before. The movie certainly doesn’t propose these young people as role models.
Most provocatively in today’s morally roiling America, it blithely, sometimes comically, lets them remain unredeemable.
The maneuvering begins with Art and Patrick as boarding school kids in their late teens. They love tennis and one day attend a match where lithe, beautiful Tashi Duncan, a prodigy who’s also in her teens, dazzles them on the court.
She also enraptures them with her sinewy, willowy body. She’s both a talented sportswoman and a sexual temptress. After a friendly, unconsummated three-way encounter in a motel room, neither young man wants to live without her.
Patrick wins Tashi’s sexual affection first, during the years when she and Art attend Stanford. Tashi’s superb playing and star quality get the tennis establishment’s attention. After triumphing in major amateur competitions, she lands a promotion deal with Adidas even before she turns pro.
She clears that hurdle, but fate intervenes. A knee injury knocks her out of competition, and she painfully resigns herself to the role of tennis coach. Her competitor’s instincts, though, only intensify. She’s determined to mold Art into the champion she can no longer be.
When he falters, Patrick re-enters their lives and he and Tashi seem to have tennis’ magic at their fingertips. But with Art still around, Patrick’s angry sexual jealousy won’t die. It’s baseless, Tashi tells him, and, despising him, sends him packing.
As years pass, Tashi once again places her hopes in Art. They marry, have a daughter, and he becomes a consistently winning pro. They’re a tennis golden couple and get rich endorsing sports products.
Art (Mike Faist) is reschooled by Tashi (Zendaya) in what it takes to become a champion
But their professional luck finally begins to slip, which is what was darkening the tension we witnessed at the movie’s jittery opening. Art has begun to lose his edge.
Patrick in the intervening years has scrounged matches wherever he could, sometimes sleeping in his car, refusing to seek help from his wealthy family. Suddenly, Art’s sinking confidence gives him his opening.
If he can now topple his long-ago friend in New Rochelle, he’ll become the grand master he’s always believed he could be. And win Tashi back?
Not so fast. We remember what she asked both suitors in the middle of their rivalries, What makes you think I want anyone to be in love with me?
Bravely, smartly, Luca isn’t asking for an audience’s love, either. In Challengers he cunningly blends sex inextricably with the characters’ yearning. The movie, hopscotching back and forth in time, is shot and edited propulsively, in urgent, erotically pulsing rhythms, demanding you keep pace.
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ pounding techno score also never stops bringing the heat, so that by the end I couldn’t imagine these three people without seeing them either wielding a racquet like a sword or locked in wriggling, gladiatorial sex.
Luca has dared to try something that I don’t think mainstream Hollywood has attempted this blatantly before. The movie certainly doesn’t propose these young people as role models. At the same time, it doesn’t climb some fancied moral high ground to throw stones at their manipulating cynicism.
Most provocatively in today’s morally roiling America, it blithely, sometimes comically, lets them remain unredeemable.
They unstoppably connive, pivot and volley. Beasts of our era. They’re talented egotists unapologetic about nabbing awards or sex wherever such conquests can be pulled off.
This sort of moral neutrality in sexuality – easing these days into polyamory and gender fluidity – is where intimacy has landed in the 21st century’s first quarter, with spiky growing pains, certainly among those under 30. It strikes me that the young are long past asking for permission and aren’t seeking acceptance for what they do.
For years we thought they’d need general approval and thus could be cajoled or frightened into conforming to “settled” norms.
Eschewing the high ground, Challengers issues to society an earthy non-judgmental counter proposal: climb into bed with us and let’s see how that goes.
Nothing mainstream there. Deal with it, Hollywood. Bravo Luca!