Antonioni’s essential declaration at the Cannes Film Festival — “Eros is sick” — is revisited in Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers. It updates the spiritual disorientation that Antonioni dramatized in his 1961 masterpiece L’Avventura, but Challengers takes place in the upscale milieu of modern championship tennis. Eighteen-year-old racket sensation Tashi Duncan (played by Zendaya) volleys between best friends and court rivals Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor). Their teenage ménage à trois, a jest Tashi proposes out of arrogant pique, continues into adulthood, when the friendship and competition become more serious and endangered.
After a game injury ends Tashi’s athletic prospects, she marries Art and becomes his coach and manager, sharing success as a super couple with a classy Aston-Martin endorsement. Tashi edits a tournament promotional ad to read plural: “Game Changers.” That’s also how Guadagnino scrutinizes the new rules of sexual competition — the subject of Zendaya’s trashy zeitgeist cable-TV series Euphoria — through the fluid flirtations and subconscious animus of Tashi, Art, and Patrick. Guadagnino breaks down their relationships by shuffling time periods: first, the tension of their reunion, followed by their initial meeting, then forward and back (13 years earlier, eight years earlier, the day before, etc.), constantly lobbing moments of deceit and confession. Together or apart, the trio’s emotional and sexual experimentation does not save them from dissatisfaction — or from themselves.
Screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes obfuscates whatever it is that motivates these characters. His conceit reflects that “Eros is sick” from the sexual disorder that plagues the millennium. Kuritzkes doesn’t venture into the trans wars that combine politics with psychosis, yet this bisexual teasing is as jejune as Tashi herself. She’s seen as a temptress, daring the boys to commit to their adolescent sexual explorations — shaming their masturbation practice, doubting their masculinity. “I’m not a homewrecker,” she says, mocking their brotherhood. The boys nervously respond, “It’s an open relationship.”
But Guadagnino is more certain about his virtuosic time-juggling montages that make erotic spectacle of these athletes at their physical prime. The emphasis on Faist’s lean musculature, O’Connor’s hirsute limbs and torso, the sexual threat of competitive player Grosu (Alex Bancila), and frequently the arc of male buttocks become prominent compositional features. Cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom captures flesh and skin texture almost palpably, providing sensual fascination.
Consider how Tashi taunts the boys: “You’re fire and ice. Which is which?” But this idea is carried through only when Guadagnino uses Trent Reznor’s BPM music score to heighten the tension of court matches and suggestive tête-à-têtes. Scenes of uncircumcised locker-room frankness rouse disequilibrium about sexual attraction that seems more European than American. The “sickness” that troubled Antonioni becomes the basis of how Tashi, Art, and Patrick tumble and fumble.
Their problem is partly class-based. Kuritzkes seems stuck in ritzy feminist mode. (He’s married to Past Lives prevaricator Celine Song.) Tashi derides Art’s temporary slump: “We could just be rich people, or you could be a tennis player.” Her hostility staves off intimacy. And there’s the larger issue that Tashi/Zendaya doesn’t fit into the film’s sexual algebra. She isn’t a compelling force like Eva Green’s Isabelle in Bertolucci’s The Dreamers. Zendaya’s Tashi is a lightweight film presence, not quite Norman Mailer’s bitch-goddess, although Zendaya plays at that role while hiding behind imprecise ethnicity that contrasts with Faist’s shrewd yet affectingly lovelorn pale white boy. (When Tashi cruelly asks Art whether he’s in love with her, he answers, “Who wouldn’t be?”) They’re innocents compared with O’Connor’s dirtbag Zweig, a cocky bastard in the game of ethnic sexual rivalry straight out of both Mailer and Philip Roth.
Despite Kuritzkes’s triangular ploy, his script manipulates gender to illustrate selfishness and contempt — the alienation hidden in competition. (Tashi’s comment that girl-on-girl tennis “is a relationship, like being in love” is merely facile.) On or off the court, these misguided characters await opportunity as redemption. Guadagnino’s focus on sensuality advances from the coy dishonesty of Call Me by Your Name to indicate that something is missing from these three lives, especially given how love is pursued (as when Patrick scrolls through his bisexual dating apps) or withheld. Kuritzkes’s ending is a cop-out. It might as well show the three sexual fad-chasers in a group hug at a Columbia University Hamas rally.
Guadagnino sought the spiritual condition of Millennial youth in his allegorical horror film Bones and All. Challengers, in its story of romantic unfairness, observes a generation’s sexual awareness and unawareness. It contradicts HBO’s Euphoria, in which Zendaya and showrunner Sam Levinson exploit drugs and sex merely for sensationalism, not great insight à la Antonioni. Guadagnino must struggle toward that wisdom, just as the spiritual apocalypse of Gregg Araki’s Nowhere strived for and caught up with Fellini’s La Dolce Vita.