Challengers

CHALLENGERS   ***

Luca Guadagnino

2024

IDEA:  Two former best friends and tennis doubles teammates - now bitter rivals for the affection of a former tennis prodigy, who's married to one of them and used to date the other - face off in a Challenger match.

BLURB:  Tennis, lust, power, and cinematic form are inextricably bound up in Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, an often unwieldy but clever and energetic relationship melodrama. In Justin Kuritzkes’s script, tennis serves as a metaphor for the love triangle between Tashi, Art, and Patrick, its constant volleys and shifts in advantage echoed in the trio’s push-and-pull seductions and attacks. They all take turns as both player and ball in a torrid erotic game that’s all about scoring the winning point. This sort of amour fou gamesmanship is fairly rote stuff, and there’s disappointingly little depth to the characters to make their affairs transcend the petulant devices of a group of affluent, insecure, self-absorbed children (which is, to be fair, what they are). But it’s ultimately less the story than the visual and sonic language of Challengers that teases and thrills, the ways in which Guadagnino extends the tennis metaphor into the structuring principle for his film’s very form. The back-and-forth gameplay of tennis inflects everything from the narrative’s ping-ponging jumps in time to the swish-panning camera movements to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score, which sounds like a techno translation of a tennis ball caught in an endless rally. For better and worse, Challengers fully embraces the repetition that’s an essential characteristic of the game; it has no wariness about how often it rehashes the competition between its protagonists, nor is it timid in its copious use of slow motion to protract a moment or linger sensuously on a face (or chest). Yet these formal expressions viscerally serve a thematic purpose, locating in repetition, frustration, fatigue, and calisthenic pleasure the ingredients of tennis as much as desire.