“Challengers”: Love Triangles and Competition in Luca Guadagnino’s New Drama

Guadagnino’s new film immerses us in the unforgiving world of tennis.

Summary

Challengers follows Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), a professional tennis champion who is trying to get over a rough patch with the help of his wife Tashi (Zendaya), a former tennis prodigy who was forced to retire after a serious injury. A challenger tennis event will put Art face-to-face with Patrick Zweig, a man who used to be his best friend and his wife’s lover.

An Interesting Vision

For starters, I should say I’ve never been a fan of Luca Guadagnino’s work. The only movie of his I kind of liked was Bones and All, a very dark love story between two young cannibals, which seemed to me weird and original at the time. And aside from the beautiful Italian landscapes, I didn’t care much about Call Me By Your Name either. While I generally don’t connect with Guadagnino’s films, they are always visually beautiful, so I have respect for him as a director.

Challengers is not different in that aspect, and the strongest point visually are the tennis matches. The final match, in particular, is presented in a way that keeps you on the edge of your seat. Those scenes are shot and edited to show the game from different perspectives, managing to create the same tension as a good action film would, which is very impressive. I don’t know a lot about competitive sports, and I’ve never watched a tennis match in my life, but I always considered it to be pretty calm compared to, let’s say, football. Not anymore.

The film also handles a number of time jumps, as it covers events spanning over more than a decade, and does it smoothly. The focal point of the story is one specific tennis match in a challenger event, when the two male protagonists face each other again after years of not being in touch. The director goes back and forth, uncovering all the events in the characters’ lives that led to that moment, but without compromising the general understanding of the plot, which I find is usually the problem with this kind of structure.

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, who had already collaborated with Guadagnino on Bones and All, composed the score.

Another Set of Unlikable People

Challengers presents this strange love triangle among the three protagonists. And I know that it’s not a requirement for characters to be good or likeable; in fact, morally gray characters tend to be the more interesting ones. But in such a case, they need to have some sort of charisma and be written in a way that allows the audience to connect with their motives. I think that was missing from this project.

All the characters are resentful people who are unhappy with their lives and who they became, but for some reason they can’t seem to get enough of each other. You can’t feel sympathy for anyone.

In the film, we see that Patrick and Art have been friends since childhood. The interest they both have in Tashi, a promising figure in the sport, and the way she fosters this competition between both men eventually ruin their friendship. Years later, Art is the one who got the great career and the woman, while Patrick is a nobody. Both O’Connor and Mike Faist do a good job, but I didn’t particularly enjoy their performances.

Why is Zendaya Everywhere?

Tashi can’t cope with the fact that her career ended before it really started. She knows she had talent, and she could have been one of the greatest. That is why she lives vicariously through her husband, pushing him to achieve everything that she couldn’t but secretly resenting him for his success. And also resenting him when he doesn’t meet her expectations.

Challengers attempts to make sexual tension a big part of the story, but those particular scenes, some of which were part of the trailers, seemed very awkward to me. I found the dialogue unnatural and a little ridiculous.

I don’t get the industry’s effort to place Zendaya as a sex symbol. She is very pretty, but she doesn’t really have that type of aura. I also don’t understand what is so great about her. Everybody admired her performance in Euphoria, which is fair, but ever since, all her performances have been pretty much the same. In this case, she sports the same unimpressed expression throughout the whole film. I’m not saying she is a bad actress, but there are others who have shown more of an acting range. Still, for some reason, Zendaya is the trendy one.

Was There a Point?

This is the kind of movie that leaves me wondering why I spent two hours of my life watching it. It ends, and I’m unsure of what the director wanted me to understand.

The story of the relationships among the characters, which I believed was the driving force behind the film, doesn’t change or evolve by the end. The situation in Art’s career is also not really resolved. So, even if the final few minutes of Challengers are fantastic, when everything is over, it doesn’t feel like a satisfying conclusion.

So far, the film has grossed $34.617.000 worldwide during the eight days since its release, with a reported production budget of around $55.000.000. The strong marketing and the involvement of Guadagnino and Zendaya in the project have gathered quite a lot of attention. Some film critics are already stating that Challengers is a “masterpiece” and “the best of this year”, when it’s not really that big of a deal. It’s a movie that has good quality, that’s all.

We are yet to see if this good streak will be enough to achieve profitability.