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Challengers 🐱🐱🐱🐱 4 Maryellens

The beautiful triad of elite athletes in Challengers is never talking about tennis. Truthfully, they are always talking about tennis—but tennis is only a game. Same goes for the film. And what a fun game it is.

From the moment doubles partners Art Donalson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) meet Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) at the US Open junior championships in Queens, their tennis partnership suddenly becomes a romantic rivalry. After winning the doubles tournament, the boys gambol over to the girls’ final, where Tashi makes quick work of her opponent. Watching her commanding performance—Tashi is a rising star—Art and Patrick fall, and they fall hard. Though they’re scheduled to face off in the boys’ final the next day, they decide to head to a party Tashi’s sponsors are throwing out on Long Island that night and take their chances. They take turns hitting balls at her, but Tashi returns each shot with easy amusement. At the end of the night she comes to their room and propositions them. Both.

So begins the sexiest movie you’ll see this year, starring three quirkily charismatic beauties probably at their hormonal peak. O’Connor has smoldered before, in his breakout film, the queer-farmer love story God’s Country. After his turn as Prince Charles in The Crown, he’s now a bona fide star, with quizzical bad-boy eyes, insane cheekbones, and the taut, wiry bod of Novak Djokovic. Faist, who’s Riff was one of the best things about Spielberg’s West Side Story, here carries more weight. (Not on his body: Riff is ripped.) Faist is more a Roger Federer type, clean cut and decent, with big, bright eyes that seem like they might melt down onto his smooth bod. Then there is Zendaya, the ravishing queen of the current cinema, serving up a cross between Maria Sharapova and Serena Williams in the best part of her already storied career.

The opponents in this contest are not evenly matched: It’s advantage, Zendaya from the first set, which she wins with a brutal two-handed backhand. The ménage we glimpsed in the trailer does not play out as we expect it will. But the threesome that kicks off that night continues for a dozen years—the narrative is discontinuous, jumping forward and backward in time—with Tashi setting the pace until the end, despite her pro career being cut short by a catastrophic injury before it even begins.

The film’s one shortcoming may be just how gorgeous these folks are. Director Luca Guadagnino never gratifies our desire—to see them actually fucking! There, I said it—but every shot is an homage to Bruce Weber. We don’t get nearly as much of the characters’ backgrounds as we do of their backsides. We do learn that the boys roomed together at an exclusive tennis academy; maybe that’s why they’re so greedy for each others’ churros? (I do mean the Mexican snack, and I don’t.) We see Tashi and Art competing for Stanford for a spell; we watch Patrick struggle with money problems and get a glancing reference to some wealthy parents he won’t solicit. And we meet Tashi’s mom, who shows up to babysit her young granddaughter, but otherwise has no apparent personality, needs, or motives. Mostly we see our lithesome trio in the thick of the struggle—hell bent on triumphing on court and in the bedroom. Stretches of the movie start to feel like really tense fashion shoots. Are we contemplating the contest, or just ogling their abs, quads, and butts?

In this way, Challengers may be best consumed as a high-stakes action flick without CIA agents, terrorists, or superheroes. Screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes has set his love triangle on a roller-coaster. He knows a bit about power couples; he’s married to Celine Song, the writer-director of last year’s marvelous Past Lives (which also described a sort of ménage, but I am digressing). I gather he’s also a tennis fanatic. He sets the action largely at Challengers, the third- or fourth-tier tournaments where the sport’s journeymen toil away season after season—or a big star might try to regain his footing. If this means nothing to you, don’t worry.  Like I said, Challengers is not about tennis.

Good thing, because Guadagnino’s specialty is young love—especially young, obsessive love. But if he may seem like an odd choice to coach young stars in what is at least tangentially a sports movie, don’t fear. He quickly gets into the game.  With cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (the director’s lensman on Call Me By Your Name and Suspiria) and editor Marco Costa (his cutter on Bones and All), he works to mimic the rhythms and strategies of the sport beautifully, turning every scene into a match. He cuts left, right, left, right—gone are the languorous long shots of his elegiac earlier films. The camera is the fourth player here, and like a really great pro it constantly mixes up the angles. We’re always on our toes, unsure if we should expect a forehand down the line, an overhead lob, or a devious drop shot.

The film’s score brilliantly heightens the action. Guadagnino told Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (his collaborators on Bones and All) that he wanted very loud techno, and they obliged. But its use is truly unusual—the music will suddenly kick in out of nowhere mid-scene, signifying a sudden shift in mood and tension: the filmmakers approximating the dramatic turns of momentum that make tennis so exciting.

Full disclosure: Tennis is the only sport I enjoy watching. I became enamored of Boris Becker when I was a teen; his matches against Ivan Lendl were like Shakespeare tragedies, great sagas of psychological warfare, played out in extreme closeup. (They also wore very short, almost transparent white shorts in those days. Reader, I was hooked.) Challengers offers much the same tense drama—which of these old pals will come out on top? Who will win the match at the rousing finale? And who will win Tashi?

And who’s playing who, exactly? That’s the most thrilling question in the film. Tennis, whether singles or doubles, always features two teams, but here there are three. When the triangle finally breaks, Tashi leaps to her feet and howls. You may, too.