Challengers is a sweaty amuse-bouche. An unreconstructed work of camp. At a time when drag is as solemn a shibboleth as the “Support Our Troops” bumper stickers once were, this film is a breath of conditioned air: nothing passes through the filter except hot rich straight people being talented and horny and self-pitying. Hot rich straight people who only know about sex and tennis and are just starting to age out of both. Luca Guadagnino, the director, self-consciously ogles the male leads. Their bromance isn’t a romance but the queer eye prefers it to be. Just as the queer body is sublimated into Zendaya: outwardly a diva, inwardly a voyeur.
Like the two guys in the throuple in Y Tu Mamá También, Patrick (Josh O’Connor) and Art (Mike Faist) masturbated together. Patrick taught Art the finer points by demonstrating on himself. They got off by thinking about a female acquaintance who would quickly vanish from their lives. But they stayed together, from tennis boarding school to college age, when they meet the up-and-coming Tashi (Zendaya) at the 2006 U.S. Open.
In what seems, at first, a puritanical move, Tashi cuts off their ménage à trois rather quickly. Yet the boys hardly notice, caught up in a folie à deux. She offers her number as a reward to the winner of the next day’s match, who turns out to be Patrick—though we already know, thanks to copious crosscutting, that Tashi will eventually coach (and marry) Art, who will eventually be a star player. Meanwhile Patrick will sleep in his car.
Notice that Challengers begins where Y Tu Mamá También ends. There’s evidently no followup conversation between the boys after Tashi peeled away and left them snogging each other’s lips. Their threesome is never consummated, but then this movie is primarily about things never being consummated: Tashi is a mere proxy in the war games these boys use as foreplay; tennis serves as intercourse. They play to a bionic heartbeat by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, who also scored Mark Zuckerberg’s all-nighters in The Social Network. The tennis court is their dance club.
Just as Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name was the platonic ideal of gay eros, scruffy Patrick feeding twinky Art a churro is a gay fantasy of straight relationships. They keep leaning against the Kinsey scale without moving the needle; this edging can only resolve itself on the court, and when they face each other, they get closer as the match intensifies until they finally breach the net. Climax! But this thirstiness does nothing to stain the high glamour of tennis whites. Professional tennis has the éclat that jazz had in Whiplash, a sports movie about artists. Challengers is an operatic reverie of elite sports. Swap his racket for a brush and Patrick is a starving artist.
Tellingly, Tashi, despite her own, all-consuming dedication to tennis, never gets to achieve that romantic distinction of Patrick’s, nor does she achieve Art’s overdetermined success. Her career ends prematurely, with an injury, relegating her to becoming a blue-balled fairy godmother: this gives an erotic tension to Tashi’s desire to live vicariously through Patrick and Art. Sex is secondary to tennis—but it is the arena in which she still feels her power, and Zendaya’s hungry eyes supply the charge that only flickered in Dune: Part Two. Her sparks summon the windstorms that follow the challengers like bursts of Sirkian psionic energy. Athletic greatness is her unrequited love; flesh is purely instrumental.
The men cannot control the wind but they do sweat like monsoons. Faist, as the washed, conceited, envious Art, gives a subtle physical performance. Art’s lordly blond body looms over Patrick in the sauna, but his muscles are as wobbly as water balloons. And O’Connor, who is scrawnier and plays the showier role, layers in a simian deviousness—suggesting that Patrick can catch anything the others throw at him with his hidden prehensile tail.
On the court, Guadagnino’s camerawork throws a lot at us, such as balls in our face. He evokes, when he dollies into Zendaya, Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951), in which a tennis champion gets tangled up in a queer-coded murder plot. Indirection piles on indirection, around a filament of sex. But where Hitchcock—and Patricia Highsmith—stay cool, Guadagnino comes in hot. Like Justin Kuritzkes’s dialogue, the film itself is knowing and yet naive, sophisticated and yet vulgar. Fan fiction from the locker room.
Movie Monster 