Review of the movie Challengers

The Italian director Luca Guadagnino, who has been working in Hollywood for a long time (Call Me By Your Name, Suspiria, Whole and Complete), presented an erotic sports thriller-melodrama Challengers,) which returned moviegoers’ interest in tennis, which had been almost irreversibly lost over the past twenty years, since no director had combined tennis with sex since Woody Allen’s Match Point.

Guadagnino not only combined them, he made them interchangeable… In the beginning, which is actually the final scene, we see a match on the Challenger tour between two thirty-year-old tennis players whose sports career is almost at an end, and the outcome of this game can put an end to it. A stern beauty wearing sunglasses and a sky-blue dress with snow-white fragments (Zendaya) is watching the match from the stands. And, as it turns out later, the sympathies of this tough beauty are as sharp, fickle, and changeable as the sky with white clouds over Atlanta, because only yesterday, the day before the tournament, a powerful, terrible hurricane raged here.

Of course, the match point will be the culmination of the fight. But before that, numerous flashbacks over twelve, eleven, eight years, a week, a day… before the final will reveal the background and secret moves inside this toxic, very toxic love triangle.

By the way, one of the young men was supposed to be portrayed by Timothée Chalamet, the director’s favorite, but due to his work on the projects Wonka and Dune 2, the actor had to refuse. And as a result, the tennis players (although this film is definitely not about love, at least not the romantic kind, which is only hindered by an insidious villain and usually flourishes in melodramas) were played by far from being as superstar and super-popular as Chalamet, by the Englishman Josh O’Connor (Emma, Chimera, The Crown) and the American Mike Feist (West Side Story). And it is very good and right that they did without a hysterically promoted handsome man who would have stood with Zendaya on the same pedestal of impeccable beauty and sexuality. Instead, O’Connor and Feist (almost down-to-earth and ordinary) played the “bottom” looking up at the statue of Aphrodite in an extremely convincing way (only this Venus has broken not her arms, but her knee and… her heart).

I recall the advertising slogan from the legendary Roma film What Women Want. If you remember, the main characters in love, the advertising heroes played by Mel Gibson and Helen Gantt, came up with the slogan “No games, only sports” for the Nike brand (or rather, she did, and he overheard, but that’s not the point). The Rivals categorically disagree with this slogan, because both tennis and intimacy (and according to the authors’ definition, these are synonyms: intimacy is tennis, tennis is intimacy) are a continuous game, a fierce struggle for first place, where no one wants an outsider. Moreover, the dilemma of “cup or girl,” where the girl is much colder than silver, resembles the Halloween custom of Trick-or-treating (“Trick or Treat,” “Candy or Death”), because to get the “trophy” beauty embodied by Zendaya is to definitely run into enormous harm.

It looks as if the studio forbade the director to show direct sex with nudity and cumming (both threesomes and more modest two-on-one). Because, firstly, teenagers are supposed to go to the cinemas, and secondly, teenagers should not be traumatized by the indecent appearance of Peter Parker’s classmate, although Zendaya has long since grown out of the image of a schoolgirl and platonic girlfriend (here, by the way, there is a moment where the authors ridicule this discrepancy or rather criminal non-use, non-use of Zendaya’s sexuality and adulthood: her on-screen daughter asks her mother to go see Spider-Man).

That’s why Guadagnino masterfully makes sex without sex. Moreover, in such a way that the entire audience, regardless of gender and age, gets wet from the drops of sweat in slowmo that drip down onto the tennis court (not to mention the focus on the actress’s sharp little breasts that stick out peremptorily through T-shirts and sweaters). The sexual waves between the guys vibrate with even greater amplitude, because unlike the cold Zendaya, they are hot… If in Call Me by Your Name carnal lust was about tenderness and love, in Rivals it is about selfishness, aggression, hatred, pragmatism and pain. And the rackets here hit the ball with such fury, such slaps, that the viewer (especially in the shots where the camera is attached directly to the tennis ball being “hit”) feels like a passive in a sadomasochistic gang bang.