Under a blazing sun, two tennis players, Art and Patrick, engage in a close match. The blows are so powerful that you almost fear seeing the ball burst. However, in this opening sequence of the film Challengers (VF), the part is in this case secondary. In fact, the camera rushes towards the stands where a young woman, Tashi, observes both tennis players with an inscrutable air. And they glanced back at him. The tension between these three is palpable. With this sensual and oozing romantic-sports drama, Luca Guadagnino, the director of Call Me By Your Name (Call me by your name in French) and I Am Love (Io sono l’amore in VO), continues its exploration of the many facets of romantic desire.
We find Art and Tashi in their luxurious suite, two weeks earlier. It turns out that Tashi is the coach of Art, a champion who hasn’t won in a while. If they are married, Art’s career seems to be, at this stage, the main link between their relationship. He gets closer, she moves away…
Then, another flashback tells us that Art and Patrick, who, in the present, seem to hate each other, were once inseparable friends…
At that time, Tashi was a star junior player with a bright future. And the two very young men awkwardly court him… In the shabby hotel room shared by Art and Patrick, to the propulsive music of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross of Nine Inch Nails, a ” trip “threesome” begins with Tashi… before the latter interrupts the antics by declaring that she is not a homewrecker – suggesting that her hosts are, deep down, and perhaps unknowingly, more than friends.
Subsequently, Tashi will choose the gifted but inconsistent Patrick, before finally marrying the less gifted but more disciplined Art.
Except that between the three of them, something remains unfinished; something that began once in that hotel room, and which will end years later on a tennis court.
In the meantime, Justin Kuritzkes’ screenplay multiplies the clashes between Tashi and Art, Tashi and Patrick, as well as Patrick and Art. In this, the private lives of the characters turn out to be exactly like the tennis matches which punctuate the drama (the opportunity for Guadagnino to pay a brilliant homage to Hitchcock and his emblematic bleacher scene in Strangers on a Train / The unknown of Nord-Express).
In fact, these face-to-face meetings, sometimes head-to-head meetings, are rounds where we pass the buck and where we score points with a destabilizing comment or a killer reply. In love and in war? To love as on the court!
Everyone wants to win, and in doing so, have fun. Except that if a player is missing, everyone loses.
Three-way exultation
Knowing all this, calling the dynamic that unites Tashi, Art and Patrick a love triangle is both accurate and reductive (see also Guadagnino’s “love square” in its semi-remake of The swimming pool, A Bigger Splash / By the swimming pool). There is, implicitly, a quite fascinating sadomasochistic component in the relationships between the protagonists: Tashi dominates the submissive Art, but is attracted by the arrogant Patrick, who sleeps with the first while pining for the second, while Art would like to win back Tashi…
On the subject of Art and Patrick, Guadagnino has fun with phallic and homoerotic symbolism during several passages: Patrick who greedily eats a banana while staring at Art, the mocking eye, or this pre-match conversation camped in a sauna (where the filmmaker deploys a variety of angles depending on who has the upper hand)… Not subtle, but funny.
Moreover, the film has a lightness almost bordering on superficiality (we are miles away from the dark poetry of Bones and All and his young cannibalistic lovers). However, the burning complicity shared by the three stars, Zendaya (the saga Duneand here producer), Josh O’Connor (God’s Own Country / Only the earth) and Mike Faist (West Side Story), as well as the depth of their respective interpretations, transcends the relative thinness of the subject.
And there is obviously the virtuoso, extremely kinetic staging of Luca Guadagnino, which makes the whole thing absolutely captivating. This, until the orgasm, sorry, the final apotheosis during which the exultation of three can finally take place, but not in the way we think.