Challengers (Luca Guadagnino, 2024): ****
Sports. Sex. Romance. Cinema. What do they share? They all celebrate the body. They are activities shaped by the fact that one glimpse of someone’s body can freeze minds, make hearts race, and get feet dancing. We downplay this truth to not seem superficial. We cloak it to appear modest. We say sports is about competition, sex about intimacy, romance love, cinema entertainment. We’re not wrong. All these activities are more than cherishing the body. But it’s dishonest to erase how much the human figure matters to them.
Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers is upfront about how the body strikes awe, how it can drive athletics, touch, relationships, and the movies. Even before MGM’s logo, the picture shows three juicy shots of its main characters’ faces. Those images display how sweat can grip the face and drip from it at once, how eyes tell stories that cannot be put into words. The rest of the film is an adrenaline-packed, funny, tense, and exuberant exploration of the body through a love triangle that spans thirteen years between tennis players. It’s about how the body is sexy, hypnotic, vulnerable, and powerful. Challengers is a miracle, a bold proclamation of something we already know in our bones but rarely say: that yes, sometimes, we can’t get how someone looks and moves out of our minds.
That’s the problem the film’s two main men have. Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick (Josh O’Connor) start as young tennis teammates and friends before turning into foes. Their rivalry begins when they sit in a crowded stadium to witness Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), amateur tennis star. Director Luca Guadagnino films this sequence in a way that emphasizes the magnetic hold Tashi’s body has over Art and Patrick, a gravitational pull that wrecks their bond. He captures Zendaya’s precise hops, fierce backhands, crisp returns, loud grunts, and perfect shadows vividly. Such sights are so magnificent that we understand why Art and Patrick nearly fall out of their chairs watching them; we believe Tashi’s image will stay with them for the rest of their lives.
This belief makes the duo’s split feel genuine. But before bitter animosity, Art and Patrick compete for Tashi’s affection in a youthful, playful, and hot way. They make moves on her at a party, invite her to their room, tell her embarrassing stories about how they share masturbation tips, kiss her on a bed, only to be duped into making out with each other while she stares. Until this steamy sequence, the movie feels like it could be about how these men are possessive, how they control Tashi’s body. However, the way Zendaya’s Tashi flirts, teasingly sits on the bed’s edge, and lustfully observes Art and Patrick make out demonstrates that she’s the one holding the reins. She knows the effect her physique has on these two boys and is turned on by what she can get them to do.
Art and Patrick will do a lot for Tashi, including waging a decade-long war to be by her side. Tashi’s joy over this may lead to online takes about how she’s a badass feminist. Like last year’s remarkable Poor Things, however, Challengers is too complex to be a neat empowerment fantasy. Much like Helen of Troy learned that mythical carnage and bloodshed follow a divine form, Tashi finds out there’s a cost to the command her body has over others.
She discovers how her figure makes her vulnerable after a bone-splitting, career-ending injury. The event sends her into the arms of puppy-like Art and away from then-boyfriend Patrick. To reward Art’s obedience, Tashi becomes his lover and coach, helping him raise a family and pass Patrick competitively. She hopes to stay loyal to Art, especially by not pursuing Patrick. But she can’t help herself; she encourages Patrick to long for her, teases Art that he may lose her, and drives them both crazy. Her problem is that it wasn’t only Art, Patrick, and the world that loved her body, she loved it too, loved it in a way that she doesn’t love the men’s physiques. She yearns for the allure of her faded figure, a yearning that can now only be satisfied when she sees Art and Patrick stretch their physical and mental capabilities to please her.
Challengers creates riveting sequences out of how Art and Patrick transform body, mind, and soul to win Tashi. Guadagnino’s picture is structured around a tennis showdown between the two, and the deeper the movie gets into the match, the more thrilling it becomes. Their duel is as intriguing, gripping, and exciting as any sports contest. This is because the two love-stoned men physically and mentally push themselves to the brink. They slide after, slam, and chase the ball, look for any mental edge, dig deep when breathless, and constantly turn courtside to witness an absorbed Tashi.
Incredibly, Art and Patrick’s conversations and looks are as pulse-pounding and electric as the tennis match. It’s easy to sense that their love for Tashi underlies their hate for each other. But also Faist and O’Connor skillfully depict how this isn’t about tennis even as they pretend otherwise. Along with Zendaya’s fine work depicting Tashi’s contradictions, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ enthralling score, and Guadagnino’s delicate filmmaking, the two turn Challengers into one of the year’s most well-crafted films.
Paradoxically, however, certain aesthetic choices limit the movie. A recurring problem for Guadagnino, his storytelling and direction can undercut the material’s passion and frenzy. Challengers is not his first work to spotlight bodies. For example, Call Me By Your Name was about two men driven mad by each other’s sight. Meanwhile, his Suspiria remake tried to evoke scares from dancers’ possessed forms. In both films, Guadagnino’s rigorous compositions suffocated his emotional ambition; the love and horror didn’t feel organic because every image, camera movement, and cut seemed too planned. Challengers eludes this problem. The film’s tennis environment offers too much kineticism, too many frantic ball volleys, twisting bodies, and turning heads, for Guadagnino’s careful direction to distract.
Still, at times, Guadagnino’s technical respectability makes things distant and cold. This is true of the work’s later make-out and sex scenes, which feel shockingly stifled and tame considering how much heat exists in the picture’s other sequences and that glorious make-out sesh. Not helping is that Justin Kuritzkes’ screenplay often presents such sexual activity as calculation’s result, especially on Tashi’s part, rather than spontaneous carnal adventure. It’s in these moments that a wish emerges for Guadagnino to abandon his prestige cinematic style and embrace the story’s trashiness, a wish that remains unfulfilled.
But who cares if Challengers isn’t flawless? It’s a tribute to the body’s importance, how beautiful, dazzling, and brittle it can be, how the sight of one can endure in our hearts forever. And what a necessary tribute! As stated earlier, our social conventions over the last few millennia evade acknowledging the ecstasy someone’s body can send us into. But it feels like our current age invests more in hiding this truth than any other in the last 50 years. Young people have less sex. People who go on diets are lambasted as fatphobic. On the other hand, people who say any person’s body can be beautiful are mocked. Prudes tweet about how sex scenes and nudity are never necessary. And a decade of arts criticism has produced endless warnings about how evil the gaze is (whether male, white, queer, etc.). Not all these trends are wholly bad. But taken together, they lack the nuance to recognize the right body arrests our eyes, inflames our passions, and uplifts our spirits.
Challengers is an antidote to all this. In its sensual, joyful, and rousing finale, it demonstrates how men bend bodies, psyches, and souls to the breaking point, all to get a girl with a mesmerizing form to turn their way. The picture is a reminder that even in adulthood, when someone with an eye-catching body looks at your figure, the heart melts like you are eighteen again.
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