Challengers Is a Sexy, Simmering Tennis Love Triangle
There’s no need to know, or even enjoy, anything about the sport of tennis to find enjoyment in director Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers. I, for example, don’t know dick about tennis. Still, tennis is inextricably knotted to its sensuous love triangle, which evolves over the course of 13 tumultuous years, climaxing with a match between two estranged players whose love story eclipses the more overt romance between the pair and Zendaya’s tennis prodigy, Tashi Duncan. But it is a story of desire, love, power and co-dependency between three gifted young athletes who all hold that nagging fear, even in their early 30s, that their best years are behind them. The only thing that can reinvigorate their lost sparks is base, animalistic competition, like that which fueled their chaotic threesome over a decade prior to the lowly Fire Town challenger tournament in New Rochelle, New York.
We first meet Tashi and Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), married and with a mostly neglected young daughter, after Tashi’s best tennis-playing days are behind her (due to a consequential leg injury) and Art is all but bereft of his mojo. Art has been struggling against players who should otherwise match his skill level. In an effort to get his head back in the game and out of early retirement, Tashi enrolls him in a challenger: A small, U.S. Open qualifier that should be beneath an athlete whose face adorns ads the size of building facades. The goal is to have Art compete against players who are obviously below him in order to loosen him up and regain his confidence. The only problem is, it’s the same kind of minor sporting event that attracts a hard-up guy like Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor).
Thirteen years earlier, Patrick and Art were both just two young tennis studs who once jerked off together (what guys can’t say the same?), in love with the same beautiful woman. Thirteen years later, one of them got the girl, the other is cosplaying as poor, and the former two haven’t spoken to the latter in years. But it’s a rival like Patrick who Art really needs to get his juice back, and maybe Tashi knew all along that they’d find him there, despite how adamantly she objects to having any association with Patrick while in New Rochelle.
Rewind 13 years again, and the college-age doubles players, longtime friends (and a secret, third thing) Patrick and Art are salivating on the stands over 18-year-old Tashi. But their eyes aren’t just drawn to her ass. They’re drawn to her serve. Both boys grasp Tashi’s power from the moment her racket hits the ball across the court. When the three finally link up at a party after her winning match, the boys can’t help but be lured—like two cartoon characters towards an aromatic pie—to Tashi’s implacable self-assuredness.
Zendaya has finally made the leap from child acting to adult acting—although, I suppose we are choosing to memory-hole Malcolm & Marie, and Dune is, admittedly, kind of a grown-up children’s movie. Off Arrakis, the Euphoria star believably plays a confident young woman who gets off on making horny boys do what she wants. She’s been unconvincing to me in her otherwise lauded performance of Rue on Euphoria, but maybe that’s because she has been, yes, an adult woman playing a teenager for the past two mediocre, overblown seasons of television. In Challengers, Zendaya is allowed to literally grow up on screen, jumping with ease from lean, limber pre-college Tashi into Art’s quiet dominatrix/coach/brand manager.
Back at that post-game party, Patrick and Art manage to persuade Tashi to show up to their dinky hotel room. In their desperation to kiss her she effortlessly paves the way for the two to make out with each other—a simmering desire between the two men made clear after they divulge an intimate preteen memory where Patrick taught Art how to masturbate. Guadagnino peppers in other homoerotic signifiers, like a scene where the two suck down churros (played perfectly, unassumingly straight), or when Art spits his gum into Patrick’s palm the same way he does for his wife in the present-day.
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