Despite Timothee Chalamet’s emergence into the spotlight, Bones and All (2022) financially underperformed and failed to achieve traction on the awards circuit it was positioned to run. It appeared that Luca Guadagnino’s midwestern romantic tragedy about lost cannibals roaming the plains to discover their purpose wasn’t exactly what audiences were salivating over. Still, outside of Call Me By Your Name (2017), Guadagnino has yet to become a household name although audiences typically show up for star-studded showcases regardless of the quality. His horror epic, Suspiria (2018), did him no favors either, and up until now, it's been difficult to categorize the caliber of director Guadagnino is capable of being. He hasn’t continuously achieved striking all four quadrants, nor is he someone who appears like he could transcend being an independent journeyman with enough distinguishable style to separate him from his peers. Yet, his movies are continuously excellent as they individually tap into a range of thrills that broil into a dazzling starburst of cinematic propulsion precisely when he means to.
Luca Guadagnino’s newest and most accessible film, Challengers (2024), is the four-quadrant grand slam we’ve been waiting for, and with MGM playing their cards right, they've capitalized on Zendaya’s star power. Alongside her is a score of talent in Mike Faist, Josh O’Connor, Trent Reznor, and Atticus Ross warping the playing field with an intoxicating house music composition that’ll worm its way into your body with every beat. With the talent behind the camera, including cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, Challengers is a frenzied volley within the infrastructure of control that results in an audience prepared to submit to the eroticism inherent to a competitive landscape.
With an initial release set for September 2023, Challengers may have discovered good fortune as an asset delayed to April 2024. Fresh off the pop culture event of the year, Dune: Part Two, the Zendaya craze is sweeping the nation while her Spider-Man franchise is caught in a standstill. Although her performance isn’t much to write home about in Dune, Guadagnino unlocks her star power by insisting her allure is as powerful as any spoken word. As Tashi Duncan (the Stanford tennis star and renowned athlete), Zendaya is plastered on billboards and ads peppered throughout the movie. Her physical prowess looms with a near lustful desire, and her physical presence sends a jolt onto any court, on every dancefloor, and throughout a room. This isn’t a camera that childishly ogles or drools over Zendaya -- it is a camera that understands she is a woman who carries her strengths with confidence that is in service of her image as an athlete. Outside of her model status beyond the movies, with her hair done, shoulders glistening, and smile beaming, Zendaya taps into the persona that distinguishes all athletes when they step onto the playing field. In a way, her experience as a model is closely associated with the stature, class, and prestige one would expect to see hanging on a banner, in a commercial, or on your favorite sports drink.
This doesn’t necessarily mean Zendaya’s performance is reduced to a digestible image rather than a layered showcase, as it is an attribute to her character to be physically stunning. Especially in an ad-riddled landscape that has diluted her image into something equal to product placement. She draws the attention of Art Donaldson (Faist) and Patrick Zweig (O’Connor), a pair of tennis aces who can’t help but lose themselves to the competitive, deified aura of Tashi, and they eventually cross paths. In a sequence that practically sold the movie to everyone, the throuple finds themselves revealing each other in a dinky, steamy hotel room, and the back-and-forth volley between the three players intensifies.
The editing by Marco Costa is the backbone of the entire film. Even if a traditionally structured narrative would allow for revelations to come to pass with a surprise, the plot volleying triangulated by three separate periods articulates an intensely realized relationship outside the parameters of a three-act structure. Challengers is acting in conversation with itself all at once without being bogged down by the expectations of exposition, rising/falling action, and conclusion.
This is an invitation for the audience to use their knowledge of the latter parts of the timeline to see how the story will follow through on the setup of the former events. Since the work is done for us, we’re given ample opportunity to acknowledge the additional elements of the production working hand in hand with each other to elevate the sources of conflict. Because of this, the audience is never lost or uncertain of where the story is going. In lesser hands, we would see a film realize the blueprints without confidence but the cross-cutting implemented as a conversational element of the story is in favor of the spectators and itself, without ever losing sight of the finish line.
Similar to Christopher Nolan, the cross-cutting here is evocative of the intensity Nolan pioneered in the 2000s. Cross-cutting has been around for decades, but the generative tension amongst contemporaries suddenly feels limitless. In the case of Challengers, cross-cutting is used to punctuate the intense details of impassioned memories that continuously contextualize the present-day events set in 2019. Through the sound of a tennis ball being slapped by a racket from a different time and place, the narrative excerpts are bookended by the characters’ ultimate destination — a tennis court. Here, all the pent-up feelings, heated arguments, and stimulating conversations are augmented by the sights and sounds of a body working to achieve the highest form of itself.
Mukdeeprom explores the bodies by placing the camera between each athlete on the court. A tennis ball whistles toward the camera and is met with a slap, a grunt, and muscle stretched to its limit. Visually, the film verbalizes an ultimate state of pleasure without ever succumbing to exploiting the characters' full frontal. For Guadagnino, the allure, the idea that there is a pleasurable source within the physical act of competition is just as tantalizing as completely undressing a character. For some, this may be too cute for the R-rated adult film it is, but to invoke the likes of De Palma and Hitchcock is enough to amplify the perversity that goes largely unseen. This is why the nature of Challengers is difficult to ignore.
Like sports, the allure of movies draws us into a world associated with higher physical beings. The IMAX/Dolby/Digital auditoriums aren’t too different from coliseums when the lights dim. So, when we get a film like Challengers that brings the world of egotistical, sex-depraved athletes to a landscape as dramatically layered as the movies, championship-level play is a shot of adrenaline. To bask in the grace of world-class athletes nearly dwarfs any spectator who can only cheer and jeer in response. In the realm of competitive tennis, it takes on a deeper, more subliminal meaning as the individual forces are supercharging their conflict through the psychological combat of every moment building towards the ending. Guadagnino eases his way into position by establishing the penultimate scenes as an intense rally before he settles into a finale that moves and grooves like no sports movie has displayed before.
With Guadagnino setting up Tashi’s escalation into a domineering architect, the stage is set for a duel that doesn’t feel too different from combat sports. Guadagnino has established a sturdy hierarchy of power but he doesn’t intend to uproot it and dismantle each player. Instead, he serves up a match point that reveals the true nature of each character that is in service of their respective arcs. In the end, Tashi, Art, and Patrick all need each other to get there, but the implied interactions articulate a deeper purpose to paint a clearer picture of their relationship. What ensues is a back-and-forth volley arcing, mirroring, sweating, and pulsating with nimble camerawork, dazzling POV shots, and slo-mo worthy of an ESPN highlight reel. Here, Challengers is at its most physically intense state, and the bodies are the furthest apart they’ve been.
Challengers is a stimulating exercise as a sports movie and as a vicarious interpretation of eroticism inherent to the medium’s infatuation with faces and bodies shaping themselves around one another. With star-making turns from Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor as tone, elegant, and romantic as they are, Guadagnino’s ability to position Zendaya above them emboldens their behavior into an electrified state beyond composure. Through this tightly bound trio corrupted by the cost of lusting after more than what they have right in front of them over time, Guadagnino explores withering vigor with a romantic eye pointed at the capabilities of the medium. The climax of Challengers is a physical tipping point the film has been building towards, and when it finally reaches the most exhausted state you can’t help but gasp in euphoria. After all, enjoying the thrill of a climax is better as a shared experience with a character who has been in search of one for years.
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