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Tennis is a sexy sport – all bulging biceps, lycra clothing, one-on-one intensity, shrieks, groans… So it makes a perfect bedfellow for the psychosexual hysteria of Challengers, a ménage- à-trois drama with ambition and sporting greatness at its core. Is this a tennis movie with sex, or a sex movie with tennis? Either way, it is all about power.
Its director Luca Guadagnino, whose Oscar-nominated Call Me By Your Name was a lissom story of sexual awakening, has a track record for depicting louche sexuality onbscreen, and this certainly fits that niche. Structured in segments and frantic flashbacks, the film begins in the present day, with Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), a sporting legend in a bad patch, possibly losing his mojo for ever. In a brief conversation, Art’s wife Tashi (Zendaya) is pointedly harsh towards him, but with a touch of sexual frisson – playful dominance perhaps – that implies this is their usual dynamic.
Tashi met Art under curious circumstances. In the early Noughties – which Guadagnino captures perfectly – Art and his best pal from boarding school Patrick (Josh O’Connor, playing a f**kboy par excellence) are promising junior tennis players who meet Tashi on the circuit and become almost comically enamoured with her. Both stare at the long-limbed future tennis superstar as if she’s a cartoon ham. She expresses her interest in them both, even telling them that whoever wins their next match can have her number.
So begins a years-long saga of career – and relationship – ups and downs; Patrick’s career dwindles to nothing, Art’s rises precipitously, and Tashi’s is forced to the sidelines after a life-changing injury. After initially dating Patrick, she moves to Art and becomes his coach/wife, but Patrick’s arrival back onto the scene makes exactly the waves you’d expect.
Faist is understated and excellent, with the sharp planes of his face offering a staggering variety of hangdog expressions, while O’Connor’s aggressive swagger and bitterness provide the movie’s punchy antagonist energy. Yet it’s Zendaya’s film: her cocky self-assurance is invigorating.
Is the film as sexy as you’d expect from Guadagnino? Yes, but more through expectation and desire than actual sex scenes. The most overtly attention-grabbing scene is early on in the film, when Tashi meets the boys in their hotel room and teases them gently, eventually arranging for them to kiss on her behalf and drawing out the homoerotic tension that hangs thick in the air. There’s almost no nudity from her and not much more from O’Connor and Faist. This is a film less about the breathless thrill of desire than about Tashi’s fight for the control she can no longer claim on the court.
All’s fair in love and tennis: it’s a brutal, animalistic tussle that leaves no one unscathed.
