Challengers Review: A Simple Story Turned Into A Skillful Epic

One needn't do a very deep internet search to find news outlets doing some adolescent tittering about the threesome scene in Luca Guadagnino's new love-triangle sports drama "Challengers." I am disappointed to report that the scene in question is not a threesome, but a brief three-way make-out session that lasts maybe 90 seconds. It's no more salacious than one might see at the average screening of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." Anyone who has watched "Y tu Mamá También" or "The Dreamers" has already enjoyed more sexual intensity.

The brief makeout, however, more or less cements long-standing romantic and sexual chemistry for the three involved. "Challengers" is about struggling through your 20s, using the echoes of your adolescence to form lasting bonds that, with enough time, ferment into resentment. Each of the male leads will, at some point, say a version of the line "He's not really in love with you, you know."

In lesser hands, "Challengers" would have been a chintzy soap opera. Guadagnino, however, is able to bolster an admittedly typical soap story with an energetic style and attention to detail. Guadagnino has long kept a close eye on the spaces his characters occupy, giving their worlds a unique texture. In "Call Me By Your Name," one could smell the Italian country breezes wafting through oaken libraries. In "Suspiria," a splash of paint on a wall or a scratch on a doorknob had significance. In "Bones and All," one could picture the lives of the absent cannibalism victims whose homes were regularly broken into.

In "Challengers," two of the three main characters occupy the well-moneyed, dull-ass hotels of the tennis elite, and one can practically feel the over-laundered bedspreads. The third, meanwhile, sleeps in his car and subsists on Starbucks bananas. I appreciate the minutiae.

The cast of "Challengers" is excellent. Mike Faist is a standout, playing Art, a character who is just as ambitious in love — and tennis — as his scruffier, more handsome friend Patrick (Josh O'Connor), but who grew up in the shadow of Patrick's rough-hewn charm. As teens, Art and Patrick were friendly enough to give each other tongue kisses. As adults, they have abandoned their homosocial closeness to vie for the affection of a woman, Tashi, (Zendaya) who comes between them.

"Challengers" begins with a professional tennis match played by Art and Patrick in 2019. Looking on stonily is Art's wife Tashi. The flashbacks explain how all three of them were once teen tennis prodigies, and how they bonded over the above-mentioned makeout session. Tashi is rich and talented and poised to be the tennis world's next superstar. She initially dates Patrick, following him to college, but Tashi leaves Patrick when he won't accept her tennis coaching or abandon his flippant, noncommittal relationship with the sport. Tashi explains that tennis isn't a game, but a relationship on the court. That heavy-handed line will come into play repeatedly during a climactic tennis match back in the present.

Tashi is eventually attracted to Art, as he was there when she sustained a grievous injury and proved himself amenable to her coaching. Tashi wants only to win, be it hearts or games. She and Art will eventually marry and have a child (we see their connubial "bliss" at the outstart), but their marriage will also carry a note of staleness and resentment. "Challengers" is about growing from the idealism of youth, through the idiot mistakes of your 20s, and into a husked-out early 30s.

Guadagnino spins a pretty simple tale into a 131-minute epic. Some critics and film professors have whinged that out-of-order storytelling is a mere structural flourish used to juice up a tale that can't stand on its own. That is perhaps true of "Challengers." The actual romantic drama offers no surprises or novelty. Still, luckily, Guadagnino tells it skilfully enough that each twist in the past can immediately play out in the present, allowing us to reflect on the rashness of youth in immediate juxtaposition with the hardness of adulthood.

And, as mentioned, the three lead actors are all great. Faist captures a relatably pathetic quality, emerging as someone talented and assured, but who needs his ambitions dictated to him. Zendaya is in a constant state of combativeness, happy to converse, but wanting to get to the point already. She needs to dominate. O'Connor possesses a cocksure attitude that only a scruffy loser can possess; there is a scene late in the film wherein he tries to psych out the Faist character by literally wagging his penis around in a sauna.

Despite the brief moment of tongue kissing mentioned above, there is frustratingly little queer energy between the two male leads. Guadagnino, a queer filmmaker, seems to leave their sexual tension frustratingly unexplored, relegating their physicality to a blustering hetero-enforcing closeness. Because of that make-out session, it's implied that the two young men merely need to be more sexual to cement their friendship, break tension, and be happier, but Guadagnino never pushes his film in a queer direction. Perhaps it is a story about the dangers of staying inside a biphobic and poly-phobic closet.

"Challengers" could have been solved with a nice, healthy polycule. Sadly, all the tantalizing queer potential gives way to disappointing heteronormativity and toxically masculine bluster.

/Film Rating: 7.5 out of 10