Let’s talk about the evolution of "the eternal triangle", whose internal entanglement is gotten further souped up in Luca Guadagnino's eighth fiction feature CHALLENGERS. Two best pals Art and Patrick (Fast and O'Connor), both junior tennis players, are both taken by a gorgeous gal player Tashi (Zendaya). Their amicable competition turns sour when Tashi realizes she has chosen the wrong one for boyfriend (we are all prone to choose the winner, right?). She is given a second chance to choose again after her dream as a top tennis player is deep-sixed by a knee injury (which is obliquely imputed to Patrick for upsetting her before a match), but the year-long friendship between the two boys are irretrievably broken. Then a few years later, Art and Patrick meet in the final game of a Challenger event, the former, an established champion coached by Tashi, whom he also marries and has a daughter with, chases his elusive Career Grand Slam while the latter is a down-and-out bottom feeder, still scraping by in his early 30s. Who will win this time?

Old scores are dredged up and a cocktail of deception, cheating, disappointment, animus, fatigue, ambition and ambivalence smolders among the trio. In CHALLENGERS, the love/hate, competition/camaraderie dynamism is cooked up audaciously with a non-linear, frequently time-frame-alternating diegesis, experimental techniques (the subjective angle from a tennis player, the whooshing rally scenes during a match, etc.), and an AMSR-engendering score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, often coordinated with a commercial-quality slo-mo sequence, that salts the triangular romance with a hipster chic and youthful assurance.

Piggybacking on the very first shooting script from Justin Kuritzkes (husband of filmmaker Celine Song, also the scribe of Guadagnino's upcoming drama QUEER, an adaptation of Burroughs' novel), Guadagnino, as expected, spurns heteronormativity and adds a scrumptious queer aroma between Art and Patrick. A gawky threesome foreplay ends up with Art and Patrick passionately making out while Tashi spectates in amusement. Later, years after their falling-out, the two bump into each other in a sauna room, both in their birthday suits, Art’s stern antagonism is countervailed by a pungent persiflage of sex bravado from Patrick, which pungently contrasts their earlier chair-yanking, churro-sharing closeness. Not to mention that final shot, a belated physical clashing into each other symbolizes the sacrality of tactile sensation between members of the sterner sex.

CHALLENGERS strictly sets its parameters around its three protagonists. Confidence and pizzazz has been growing into Zendaya, toing and froing between teenage ebullience and adult apprehension, whose Tashi is more than a glamor puss. She has enough cunning to vicariously effectuate her self-actualization, but despite herself, she also cannot escape from the sequela of a comedown after she hears the death knell of her life’s purpose.

As for the two boys, Art “the golden boy” and Patrick “the maverick” are two sides of the same pursuance, one makes it and the other doesn’t, one suffers from inanition and the other still aspires to a castle-in-the-sky miracle. Debatably, Faist and O’Connor ignite more sparks together than either of whom with Zendaya, and O’Connor is exceptionally talented in delivering all the nuanced expressions. Putting on a sanguine defense when defeated or rejected, brazenly dragging Tashi down to the level of abasement that has become his comfort zone, O’Connor pours in more than enough compassion and ambiguity to allure audience into the entrapment, like Tashi eventually does, there is neither an easy solution nor a moral guideline in Guadagnino’s whimsy, liberating version of a messily human “eternal triangle”.

referential entries: Guadagnino's BONES AND ALL (2022, 7.3/10), CALL ME BY YOUR NAME (2017, 8.9/10); Ira Sachs's PASSAGES (2023, 6.7/10); Jean Eustache's THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE (1973, 8.1/10).

Title: Challengers

Year: 2024

Country: USA

Language: English

Genre: Drama, Romance, Sport

Director: Luca Guadagnino

Screenwriter: Justin Kuritzkes

Music: Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross

Cinematography: Sayombhu Mukdeeprom

Editor: Marco Costa

Cast:

Zendaya

Mike Faist

Josh O'Connor

Nada Despotovich

Darnell Appling

Hailey Gates

A.J. Lister

Rating: 7.4/10