Challengers (2024)

**/****
starring Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, Mike Faist
written by Justin Kuritzkes
directed by Luca Guadagnino

by Walter Chaw Challengers feels…what’s the word, is it “coy?” It’s a tease, a jape, a roundelay and a smug one. It promises the world and delivers a quintessence of dust: a movie about tennis where the balls are blue. The best part is near the end, when two once and future lovers consider each other from across a swirling maelstrom–a scene of heightened emotions right there on the verge of magic realism that reminded me of better movies like Adrian Lyne’s Unfaithful and Jacques Tati’s M. Hulot’s Holiday and even Bronwen Hughes’s wildly underestimated Forces of Nature. What a pity the resolution to said scene is a heatless tumble in the backseat of a beater. It’s possible that consummation in the sexual sense is meant to take a backseat to ecstatic metaphor–that fucking is secondary to dazzling cinematography and a sweaty clinch in front of an adoring crowd. That would explain why the non-tennis sequences are equally sparkless: the two-thirds of the book you skim to get back to the good bits. Off the court, it’s an irritating, underwritten melodrama played by two fantastic actors and one who purses their lips and concentrates a lot, husky-whispering like late-career J-Lo when trying to convey seriousness. The one who seems altogether unworthy of the attentions of the other two points on this love triangle, so that any hint of romantic suspense has fled. Of course the boys should be together: the boys are the sexy ones in perpetual heat. What are we even doing here?

Art (Mike Faist) is a famous tennis player and Tashi (Zendaya) his Lady Macbeth. Art’s ex-best friend, Patrick (Josh O’Connor), is a homeless tennis guy who follows the pro tour, hoping to get a berth and a purse. This leads to a lot of tennis and crowd-watching-tennis scenes that are straight out of Strangers on a Train, except for the bit where the camera appears to be mounted on a tennis ball. The film’s time-hopping structure takes us back to when Art and Patrick are inseparable doubles champs who both fall for singles champ Tashi, until that one night they almost do the Wild Things thing together but have neither the will nor the libido to see it through. I’m fascinated that the trailer gives away Tashi’s cockblock (or is it matchmaking? Hmmmmmmmm)–“Come for the threeway, stay for the ‘just kidding.'” Is the allure of this film that these young up-and-comers will play out the motions of an FMM ménage à trois bedroom farce without cashing the check? Maybe the whole thing is one of those “Love is…” comics in which two naked children make doe eyes under tortured daily-affirmation aphorisms. Tennis is, after all, the only sport where one of the scores is “love.”

I’m told this film is an updating of Ernst Lubitsch’s fabulously pre-Code romcom Design for Living (1933), though aside from a few cosmetic similarities, I’m having trouble making the same kind of reach. In that film, Miriam Hopkins is Gilda (pronounced with a fetching “J” sound), an industrial artist in much the same way, it occurs to me, as Vertigo‘s Midge, who’s also mired in a complicated three-way relationship. The common reading of it that it’s Gilda juggling the attentions of two men, painter George (Gary Cooper) and playwright Tom (Frederic March), tends to overlook that Gilda’s hot for both of them and less the object being pursued than a predator with insatiable appetites. She tells them as much, offers to move in with them (they’re roommates we’re introduced to as sleeping together–platonically, sort of) because she likes to be around them and enjoys turning them on, warns them there will be no sex so as to preserve their fragile ecosystem, and then promptly sleeps with George and Tom turn. Lubitsch doesn’t demonize her for this. Indeed, he celebrates it. Hopkins is effervescent, as was her natural state, and Lubitsch lets the three of them throw sparks off one another like a grindstone sharpening a dull pair of axes. Challengers replaces that confidence in its script and performers with what feels like the YA version of Design for Living: hyper-edited, broadly scripted, the subtext of the former and its Noel Coward entendre yanked kicking and screaming into the text.

What this means is that Faist and O’Connor are red-hot together, natural and sexy, and Zendaya is not for a moment believable. I’m sorry, I’ve tried. I don’t buy her as an action star, I don’t buy her as a dramatic actor, I really don’t buy her as a puppet master controlling her husband’s career, and I similarly don’t buy her as a careerist narcissist life/sex coach in the Susan Sarandon-in-Bull Durham mode. Her Tashi begins as an object of lust and swiftly becomes a sexual manipulator interested in glory on the coattails of Art, who, ultimately, does not share her ambitions. Neither does Patrick. When he comes back into Art and Tashi’s lives after a period of years, it’s not with well-wishes, but rather as a consequence of Art losing his mojo and trying to recapture it by entering a round-robin tournament that’s allegedly beneath him. There’s a tickle of tension about whether Tashi will still love Art if Art is no longer good at tennis, but only a tickle, right? Because I don’t particularly care if they stay together or not. Then there’s the hint of complication around whether Tashi will fuck Patrick into throwing the match, but, again… Look, if Zendaya makes sense to you, I bet this movie is pretty good. If she doesn’t, well, you can see how that might be a problem, given that she’s the emotional centre of the film. That’s the biggest issue for me: the decision to make Tashi the linchpin instead of Art and Patrick, who have obviously sublimated their mutual affection into a vessel that, by design, could never fulfill them the way they could fulfill each other.

I will say that there’s not much going on here if Challengers wants to talk about the price of fame, the cost of perfection, or the toll on personal relationships for high achievers. If it’s as light as Lubitsch’s films appear to be, I would counter that those were never incomprehensible emotionally. Their wit never felt like witticism; their endings never felt unearned or like a distraction, a surprise solution to what one never assumed was a puzzle in the first place. Trouble in Paradise, a love story between two jewel thieves, isn’t a mystery whodunit, and Ninotchka, about a Soviet diplomat overseeing the sale of jewels confiscated during the Russian Revolution, isn’t a spy thriller. Lubitsch movies are, first and foremost, about smart, charismatic people using language as dance. Challengers uses young, beautiful people as props in a technological marvel leading to a “surprise” ending. It wants very much, I suspect, to be Lubitsch (or a Pierre Étaix film in its physicality, perhaps), but it’s too leaden of tongue and foot. Its contrivances are too contrived and don’t obscure the hole in its middle. By positioning Tashi as first object, then villain, she is simultaneously elevated and reduced. Yet she’s never quite equal. I’ve admired Guadagnino in the past for his daring, his lawlessness, his willingness in the Prufrock of it all to eat a peach. Challengers is just pretty and pretty clearly for someone else: mermaids volleying each to each.