Programme Notes: Challengers

Yearning is a language best spoken without words. A stolen glance, a shy smile confined to the corners of a lip, blood rushing through veins and vessels with primitive immediacy. All is heightened in wanting, a truth few filmmakers working today understand with such clarity as Luca Guadagnino. 

The Italian director's body of work is most commonly described as a cinema of desire, with his back-to­-back features of I Am Love (2009), A Bigger Splash (2015) and Call Me By Your Name (2017) aptly titled The Desire Trilogy. The characters in the trilogy begin their stories somewhat confined to polite society's restraints just to suddenly find themselves unable to resist the alluring hands of temptation. A Russian immigrant turned high society madam falls madly in love with her son's restaurateur friend, a spouse finds in the memories of his wife's passionate past the encouragement to step outside the lines of marriage, a teenage boy experiences unexpected longings when a stranger crosses the wooden doors of his summer house. 

Even when a Guadagnino film seems to be about something else other than longing, desire still presents itself as a surreptitious driving force. It can be curiosity, the desire to find elusive answers, as with the team of Italian filmmakers who travels to London to recreate a gruesome murder in 1999's The Protagonists; the desire for greatness and belonging that leads an American student to unbeknownst enter a coven of witches in 2018's Suspiria or the desire for beauty and possession, told through the story of an Italian shoemaker whose art would adorn the feet of Hollywood stars and European queens in 2019's Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams or one of Guadagnino's many ethereal, immersive fashion ads. 

Following Bones and All, a cannibal love story that took the notion of longing to the literal degree of consummation, Guadagnino once again prods at how youthful yearning comes to shape one's adulthood – and, in a way, their sense of self – with Challengers. Here, the ping-ponging of a tennis ball is echoed in the seesawing relationship between Tashi (Zendaya), Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick (Josh O'Connor), three tennis players whose lives have become impossibly entangled in the 13 years they have known each other.

It is not only the relationship between the trio that echoes the comings and goings of the bright green ball. Challengers is told non-linearly, with Guadagnino introducing the trio through flashbacks interspersed with a fateful match that acts as the culmination of over a decade of brewing passion and resentment. As shirts become more and more drenched with sweat and skidding feet cut through the jittery air of the court, the murky dynamics of the relationships at play come to the fore. 

We learn very little about the background of these characters. We know that Art and Patrick met at 12 in a posh boarding school carefully designed to shape the next generation of tennis champions, a world out of reach to Tashi, who came from humbler beginnings and skyrocketed to the top thanks to a mix of talent and ambition. By the time the three meet at a tournament, the tables have turned and Tashi is an 18-year-old set for stardom, while Patrick and Art are just beginning to make a name for themselves as a duo aptly known as Fire and Ice.

It is clear from the get-go that Patrick is fire, burning bright with the dangerous flames of charm and lust while Art has grown used to being the tender balm that soothes the burns. Art is interested in how Tashi moves in the court. Patrick is much more concerned with whether or not she'll make it to their hotel bedroom. Art's gaze lingers on Tashi's lengthy limbs, remembering how the racket cut through the air as an extension of her body. Patrick can't see much past the fog of lust. 

And so Challengers unravels as a game of tug-of-war, zigzagging through present and past to comment on the kind of twisted desire that spawns out of envy disguised as admiration. This encompassing of a longer period in the characters' lives allows Guadagnino to fully flesh out the consequences of desire when viewed through the lens of time. In previous efforts, the Italian director teased and played with the hidden truths of unknown pasts, leaving it to the viewer to fill in the gaps of how the primal urges of youth affect how one acts on the impulses that come in adulthood. Here, we see the ripples of yearning play out as time sharpens bones and feelings alike, rusting once well-oiled friendships and sucking the joy out of play – both literal and metaphorical. 

Through Guadagnino's skilled eye, Justin Kuritzkes's script comes to life as a siren, luring the viewer in with the sensuous chant of desire just to spit them out plagued by a lingering sense of complicity. But here's one of the many ways in which Challengers finds its brilliance: it plants this seed of intrigue without ever taking away from its many pleasures. The swift pulling of a bench so old friends can come closer together, the smell of stale churro mixed with drying sweat, the tense prancing when lines have yet to be drawn out, a moment of certainty abruptly cut by the realisation that the game is still unfolding and the match is far from won. 

Such pleasures edge Challengers into hyperbole territory. It's easy to walk out of the screening room convinced that this is what cinema has been missing – unbridled sexiness, hot new talent, bold colours. A sense of excitement that never dwindles, scored to the pulsating beats of regular David Fincher collaborators Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. As Josh O'Connor kicks off the adrenaline-fuelled sequence that announces the final play in Guadagnino's take on the sports movie, all pretences of modesty are done with for good. This is greatness, messy and thrilling and delicious, and we are the lucky ones who get to witness it from courtside seats. 

24 April 2024 

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