Exhibition match for three
Challengers
Luca Guadagnino, 2024
In tennis, the term “love” is used to indicate a score of zero, quite an ironic contrast to the emotions and passions it typically connotes. Luca Guadagnino’s latest film Challengers attempts to explore this irony, setting up a love triangle against the backdrop of professional tennis.
The film opens with a tense tennis match between two former best friends, Patrick (Joshua O’Connor) and Art (Mike Faist)— the former a one-hit-wonder player who’s now poor and desperate for success, the latter a tennis rockstar who’s won all the big tournaments except for the US Open and has struggled recently with his self-esteem. Watching them from the first row, right at the centre of the tennis court, is Tashi (Zendaya), Art’s wife and trainer, but also Patrick’s ex girlfriend.
Through numerous flashbacks that frequently disrupt the match, the film reveals the trio’s intertwined past. The two boys grew up together in a tennis academy since they were teenagers and by the time they met Tashi, a very promising tennis junior player, the two had developed a semi-symbiotic relationship.
As in every love triangle story, they both fall in love with Tashi, who’s very ambitious and seemingly only interested in her tennis career, until a tragic injury halts her ascent. Patrick, who has become her boyfriend meanwhile, is unable to deal with that, so she turns to the other less extravagant, more serious Art and decides to put all her focus into training him, projecting her ambition onto him. He eventually becomes her husband.
Courtside courtship
Guadagnino builds the entire narrative around a tennis match, which as Tashi declares, is like a relationship, or rather a metaphor for it. While a tennis match is usually between two player, the Italian director introduces a third element, or player, creating a geometric imbalance in a sport where the back and forth can only move on one perpendicular axis.
Cinema is full of love triangle stories, between two men and one woman, who’s usually the object of both their desire —François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim, for example, or Mike Nichols’ Carnal Knowledge. However, the premise of a love entanglement story delivers too little here, and what should be the emotional core of the film feels too forced and contrived to be credible and stand up to titles like the former.
“If tennis really is a relationship, Guadagnino’s match turns out to be quite boring”
In Guadagnino’s Challengers Tashi, the female part of the triangle, is not only the object of desire, but is also the demiurge, the deus ex machina who controls Patrick and Art like two puppets, using sex as a means to achieve whatever she wants.
This seems to be a trend nowadays, especially among male directors who, while giving agency to female characters, and making them the ones in charge, depict them as cynical, cold, and emotionless. Guadagnino portrays a female character who is deeply conscious of her sex appeal and her power over men. Yet this cold surface does not reveal anything deeper. Tashi moves like an emotionless predator, setting sex-traps for the men around her.
And in the end, she becomes merely a device for the narrative to bring the two men together again. Guadagnino grants his only female character agency just to have her fade into the shadows of the two naive and dull men.
Spectacular distractions
On the other hand Patrick and Art, her male counterparts, do not seem to evolve throughout the entire film. By the end, they remain two stereotypical horny teenagers, still fighting over the same cold woman.
One could argue that the real relationship is between them and that Guadagnino’s main interest is the precarious line between love and friendship. Nonetheless, throughout the film, they keep travelling back and forth through their own paths, like a tennis ball, still intimidated by Tashi’s gaze and without gaining any self-awareness.
If tennis really is a relationship, Guadagnino’s match turns out to be quite boring. That’s probably why he fills the narrative gap with a visual bulimia, burdened with changes of perspective, ellipses, and technical tricks that culminate in the POV of a tennis ball. Rather than adding depth to the narrative, these strategies seem only directed to extort a “wow” from the spectators.
The only crack in this polished narrative, is represented by Art and his decision to abandon his tennis career. However, Guadagnino seems uninterested in this topic, and uses Art’s disenchantment only to fuel Tashi’s ambition. It could have been interesting to address this issue though, not only for the huge noise raised during the past Olympics about the mental health consequences of highly competitive sports, but also to show a multifaceted portray of a character that remains otherwise flat.
A cold exhibition match
If everything is tennis, then nothing is tennis anymore.
In the end, it is used merely as a means to make the characters meet, and the metaphor of tennis as a relationship finds no real evidence throughout the whole film. Like the ball that goes back and forth through the court, the relationships depicted in the film - evolving only on one axis - leave no room for a more nuanced and complex representation. We are left with just the surface of things, like the sweat that pours abundantly over the characters’ close-ups, it only flows on the surface, like in any well-shot commercial.
“Despite the director’s attempts to inject visual and acoustic dynamism into the film, Challengers never quite sparks ”
But the greatest underachievement of the film lies at the very basis of the story itself: the love entanglement that creates the foundation of the story never really ignites. As a result of Tashi’s rigidity and coldness, her marriage with Art does not have real consistency, and even her passion with Patrick does not seems credible (and the kitsch trick of the storm that surrounds them for their final kiss does not help).
Even the infamous threesome scene, in its desperate quest for a meaning within the relationship between the trio, ends up being passionless, nothing but a cold game orchestrated by the girl who’s not really interested in them. In other love triangle films, intensity and tension are key elements that drive the narrative, though they totally lack in the interactions between the three characters. That’s why Guadagnino relies on overbearing techno music to build up tension, which however ends up being excessive and occasionally pretentious, making it even difficult to hear the dialogues at times.
Despite the director’s attempts to inject visual and acoustic dynamism into the film, Challengers never quite sparks and all the technical tricks cannot compensate for the lack of a cohesive storyline. The recurring metaphor of tennis as a relationship falls flat, never fully integrated into the narrative of the film, which seem to be more about style than anything else.