Three boys, tennis, the attraction for a love without rules. A drama starring Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Josh O'Connor; directed by Luca Guadagnino; written by Justine Kuritzkes
A tennis match by definition is divided into points, sets, and games. A set consists of a minimum of six games; to gain a set advantage you need to have at least two sets ahead of your opponent; to win it you need to get points 15, 30, and 40; lastly, the decisive one, to have the entire match. In Challengers, feelings and falling in love with a sport and competition come into play; the six games are subjected to "taxation" regardless of the roles of the winner or loser, neglecting the role of hero in a paradoxical three-way game, outside of pre-packaged "slavery", within a linearity such as to exorcise a "hyped", non-existent scandal.
A way, a game, to make overcome paradoxes explicit, in a work, Challengers, which bears the signature of Luca Guadagnino.
In Challengers a best of three X six set storyline
We follow the rhythm of a match, also including set breaks, violations, and decomposed and recomposed combinations. Tishi Duncan, Art Donaldson, Patrick, three champions of university tennis aspiring to international sports: first set. Friendship, attraction, meeting, and choice: two boys united by the same passion and the same skill; a girl, the best on campus, beautiful, attractive, and a stake, attracted without delimiting amorous perimeters, without insinuations and explicit satisfaction: second set.
Parallelism and temporal returns: an injury, a couple that explodes, and the other that is created on its ruins, a daughter, continuous training, evolving leadership, the shadow of an excluded person who perseveres to get back into the game: third set. The match, one against the other, the podium: fourth set. An interrupted career, a talent reduced to being preserved in a maniacal excess, one man and the shadow of the other, bets, loser and winner, two going at the pace of three: fifth set. An agreement, humiliation and complacency, tiredness and sublimation, never two without three: sixth and final set.
The cinematic technicalities of a film that surpasses its own script
Challengers require research and cinematic analysis that cannot ignore the temporality and narrative times that give the film a particular characterization; we are continually moved by a replay and a stop, in a match that seems to be the last, not by simple metaphor but because the three protagonists, equally masochistic as they are self-centered, let go and breathe a final sigh of relief after countless worries mutual, twisted together and turned towards each other, where "she" is center, origin, and end. “The intrigue” in the Bertolucci manner made of sentimentalism to the point of predominant amorous exhaustion, and faints. Here, however, there is no sacred connection between the labyrinthine attractions and revelations that "afflict" the cinematographic act.
In Luca Guadagnino the hint prevails, never a concrete meaning that dictates rules and behaviors.
Challengers is a film that deserves study from a scientific, psychological, and writing point of view. It is a film that highlights an intrusive and evident editing work in a continuous removal and then addition through processes that come from the past and construct the reality that is slow to be perceived, until the moment in which the lexical path gets tangled up in forms of a glaring restlessness due to a "compressed" posture due to a dry narration.
Luca Guadagnino has clearly entered the Hollywood Olympus; his, an attentive look towards issues for which the Italian mass was, fundamentally, unprepared. “Call me by your name” he has undoubtedly designed a still unpublished social “journey”, outside the comforts of custom.
Challengers is not about polygamous love, it is not about sex, and it is not even the kind of cinema that is needed today; it is a need for distraction, a formula that refers to a refined sporting context, within an intentional imagination outside of contingent realities.
Tennis as a pattern and rule of charm, of clandestine relationships, of sexuality had already been cleared in many ways by the video clips created in the MTV era, even before by Woody Allen or by the dramas in hotel rooms of a wild Loredana Bertè; so why do Challengers in April 2024 excites and ignites so much curiosity again?
The excellence of Challengers is all in the acting
It is right to highlight the director's masterful ability in coordinating three actors such as Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Josh O'Connor; this is where sporting value becomes an authentically cinematic match; the dynamics between the three protagonists are clear, almost as if they were part of an installation and felt the moral responsibility for it. The "test" to which the actor submits is not the "word", but the meaning that derives from the behaviors, from the attitudes that have built three different personalities, excellent enough to have difficulty distinguishing the fiction from a more documentary dimension, bringing us back to earth only when the music (work signed by record producers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross) intervenes in the gaps, in the linguistic voids of a film that does not aim at cultural habituation but rather at giving the spectator the sex nouvelle of which the cinema of Guadagnino plows the direction.
The real scandal is the revelation of the possibility of a new idea of love: sports
But let's go further: without writing and technicalities, Challengers is an interesting film because it seems to mess up a concept: possessiveness.
In this film, possessiveness has no match to play and not even balls in the pocket to extend the shot. An avant-garde with a social matrix advances, typical of a cinema that represents without judging; three people in love with themselves and each other without calculation, without degenerating into possession, leaving the question deliberately open.
Tennis aims exclusively to regulate the game through perfect balance; without ever humiliating in betrayal, without forced choices; a "combination" that attributes a Pop intention, through the dressing of the brand which transforms into the "iconic" presence of new femininity that Zendaya, like it or not, depicts in a successful collaboration with O'Connor and Faist, beautiful sweaty, one blond, the other dark-haired, one shy, the other dominant due to bastard masculinity: the three protagonists manage to capture regardless of the too many scenographic scaffolding that a “very American” film like Challengers has at its disposal.
Challengers: evaluation and conclusion
Challengers is a planning machine; it can be understood from the "context" which certifies painstaking care in the construction of a "business" which skilfully plays with the times of our patience, which questions us on the capacity for elective "seduction" by applying incorrect and at the same time attractive, and therefore dangerous, rules. In fact, Challengers plays with the viewer's gaze; we watch a tennis match that hypnotizes us to the point that we become the movement of the camera; the strength is the three-dimensionality of the image, the involvement of action that challenges by raising the sound and making the three characters even more compelling, persuasive and fascinating, becoming us the role of attack and defense.
Challengers is not a complicated film but it is a determined film, with assertive observation paralyzed in its investigations of humanization. Appreciations are necessary for the lack of a "ferocity" exasperated by politically correct equations, for the unsustainability of a parallelism, for the weaning of the romantically granted, for the balance between femininity and masculinity and the lack of subordination in a a game that dribbles without any hope of landing. Challengers is not the possession of a love but the freezing of greedy emotions "synchronized" for the sole purpose of lying but never mocking sincerity.
The film directed by Luca Guadagnino will be in cinemas from April 24, 2024, and distributed by Warner Bros..