At a time when “polyamory” is a buzzword, spawning numerous features in prominent news outlets, it makes sense that onlookers would assume Challengers joins the discourse. One minute into the film’s trailer you see Gen Z’s favorite actress, Zendaya, sitting on a bed between two men as they kiss her. So it’s no surprise to see headlines such as this doozy from Vox last week: “Challengers is the best thing that could happen to polyamory.”
Yet author Alex Abad-Santos’s reading of the film is almost hilariously wrong.
“Sun-drenched and sweat-soaked, the film demystifies polyamory into something blazingly simple: being in love — physically and emotionally — with two people and being loved back can make a person as happy as they’ve ever been or ever will be,” Abad-Santos writes.
All of this talk about polyamory hearkens to Challengers’s infamous trailer scene: teenagers and budding tennis stars Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) on a hotel room bed.
Art and Patrick, who attend boarding school together, have been ogling Tashi all day. Surely a future pro, Tashi already has name recognition and a sponsorship deal with Adidas — “She’s going to turn her whole family into millionaires,” Josh says. After the three meet at a tennis tournament, the two starstruck boys invite her to their hotel room.
When she arrives, she takes charge, telling the boys to sit on the bed. She kisses each one of them in turn, then brings them together and has them kiss her, then each other. Leaning back on the bed, she smiles knowingly as she watches the two friends making out. She abruptly breaks up the canoodling she started by declaring that she’s going to bed and that whoever wins tomorrow’s tennis match can have her number.
What follows throughout the rest of the film is not a story about polyamory. It’s a story about drive, perfectionism, and what happens when excellent cinematography is paired with a disharmonious soundtrack. But ultimately, it isn’t a story about much.
As a Luca Guadagnino film, Challengers revels in its male leads, but it’s Tashi who is the film’s star — or anti-hero. While Art and Patrick are having emotionally charged discussions over churros or while dripping sweat in a sauna, Tashi is driving the narrative. After suffering a career-ending knee injury, she has become a coach and, inexplicably, wife to Art, whose skills are good, but not great. Even after her marriage, Tashi finds herself picking and repicking the winner and the loser between her “little white boys.”
While the R-rated film is full of sexual promise — churros, bananas, fat droplets of sweat sluicing down a chiseled jaw — it is remarkably light on sex. Part of this may be thanks to Zendaya, whose contract reportedly has a no-nudity clause. But mostly it’s because Challengers seems really to be about two men who are in love but can’t admit it to themselves and the beautiful but ruthless woman who controls them. Tashi sleeps with Art and Patrick at various times, but never together. The film’s unwavering focus on its protagonists makes it seem as if there’s more going on among the three of them than there actually is. For Tashi’s part, sex is leverage, a way to bargain with the men to get what she wants, which is “to watch some good f***ing tennis.”
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Whether you want to say Challengers is about sex or power or something else, the unfortunate reality is that it isn’t about much. The New Yorker’s Tyler Foggatt rightly calls it “a shot of dopamine that doesn’t really argue anything.” Challengers leaves you with no one to root for and substitutes an incongruous EDM soundtrack for real emotional turbulence.
In the final scene, Art and Patrick are facing each other in a tennis match after years of fighting over the same woman. The last, dramatic moment ends with Art lurching to hit the ball and landing in Patrick’s arms. We’re not sure who won the match, but the good thing is we’ve been given no reason to care.