Why do film critics wank themselves into a frenzy of adulation over the plainly mediocre – sorry, “visionary” – film director Luca Guadagnino?
Is it because he’s Italian, with a very Italian and difficult to spell name? Or is it just to confirm the complete redundancy of critics nowadays? And the foolishness of taking them seriously at all? Even just to contradict them?
Whatever the reason, I’ve now lost nearly four and a half hours of my life, thanks to their Guadagnino fetish. First Call Me By Your Name, the most overrated film of 2017 (nominated for four Oscars, including Best Picture), and now Challengers, the most heavily-trailed and overrated film of 2024 – 88% on Rotten Tomatoes, which also offers this ‘critics consensus’:
‘With its trio of outstanding performers volleying their star power back and forth without ever dropping the ball, Challengers is a kinetic and sexy romp at court.’
Needless to say, none of this is true.
I reviewed Call Me By Your Name here, and now I suppose I have to write something about Challengers. To spare you, I’ll try to keep it brief.
Challengers’ main achievement is to be even more boring, and its much-vaunted ‘homoerotics’ even faker and more forced, than Call Me By Your Name. I’m glad I waited for it to be streamed for free on Prime Video, but I would strongly advise you give it a total swerve.
At least Call Me By Your Name set in Tuscany, Italy had some nice scenery, including Timothy Chalamet, and looked expensive. Challengers, set in the world of US professional tennis looks and feels like a soap opera. Though in truth, most soaps would not have indulged in the constant, annoying, amateurish flashbacks this movie goes in for. Movie flashbacks have their place – but you have to care enough about the characters to put up with them, let alone keep track.
Challengers doesn’t bother with any of that, and so the flashbacks (“Thirteen years earlier…”) just make the 130-minute running time feel twice as long.
Adding to the confusion, it has a bizarre grinding techno soundtrack (by Trent Reznor) that keeps intruding inexplicably into scenes as if it’s from an action movie that got accidentally transposed into a melodrama in the edit suite. It’s the sound of someone desperately flogging something flagging.
What is the plot? Well, it’s the sub-plot, darling. As a young Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) helpfully explains to young Patrick Zweig (Mike Faist) and Art Donaldson (Josh O’Connor) early on in the film, after soundly thrashing a much less attractive white German woman tennis player (with loud, two-handed grunts): “Tennis is a relationship… we understood each other completely. So did everyone watching. It’s like we were in love.”
Leaving aside that no one actually talks like this (and there’s a lot of that in this film), this is clunky explication of something that you should be able to read or infer and feel yourself, without didactic dialogue – if the film was at all successful. But I suppose that’s just terribly 20th Century.
So, this isn’t a film about tennis. Not only that, this is a film that isn’t about tennis that tells you it isn’t about tennis. It’s about relationships. How clever! But the relationships don’t make much sense, or convince. Patrick and Art are, in 2006 flashback, best friends who have just won the boys junior doubles who both become infatuated after watching Tashi smash the German Fraulein.
Tashi, and of course LG, think that Patrick and Art are lovers. Even if they don’t know it. “I don’t want to be a home wrecker,” she says. But eventually she meets them in their shared bedroom and gets a group snog going that spirals into a passionate one-on-one furious, slightly comical snog between Patrick and Art, like two dogs trying to devour a treat first. Then she leaves.
But Tashi soon becomes the “homewrecker” that she said she didn’t want to be, in effect ending the friendship between the two boys.
The rest of the film, and the next thirteen years, is presented as a kind of interruption of the boys’ progression from best friends into adult lovers by the mistaken belief that they fancied Tashi rather than one another, and were rivals rather than lovers. But even if you suspend disbelief, overlooking that male best friends may love one another, and may even have sex, but don’t become romantically involved, none of this is compelling.
Despite the overdetermined churro-noshing, and sweaty sauna scenes, there isn’t much electricity between O’Connor and Faist. Though I may be prejudiced because Josh O’Connor played Prince Charles in Netflix’s The Crown. And that’s a difficult thing to unsee. (O’Connor also played a gay shepherd in God’s Own Country, the second most overrated film of 2017.)
Faist though makes a good fist of holding your interest, considering the circumstances. And the director. Again, I’m probably partial, as I like gingers me, but he has a charisma and an ambiguousness that O’Connor lacks.
Zendaya is pretty, but also pretty awful here, stomping about and scowling. But then her character is awful. Tashi is mostly a bossy plot and audience demographic device. Challengers was made by MGM/Amazon Prime, which like Netflix, is very keen on unlikely, or ‘slashy’, male-on-male love stories aimed at women – M4M4W, if you will. (See also Red, White and Royal Blue a 2023 Amazon Prime Mills & Boon-ish M4M4W rom-com – for which a sequel is, unaccountably, being made.)
Tashi is the assertive and voyeuristic female gaze enjoying and stoking-stroking the “sexual tension” between the subby male “leads”. Their “love affair” exists for her. Which is why, ultimately, it is so unconvincing. If it were believable, it wouldn’t need her – or the target audience she represents.
Challengers also doesn’t bother with a proper ending – despite starting with and building the entire film around the end: a closely-fought tennis final in 2019 between the once best friends turned rivals, watched by Zendaya, now Patrick’s coach. Hence all those flashbacks as the match progresses.
The match is, of course, telegraphed as being a form of public fucking. Complete with shots of the panting boys from below, looking down and dripping their athletic sweat onto us as they labour away.
Now, as the daddy of spornosexuals, I’m all about the single entendre, especially when it comes to jocks. But Challengers takes all the fun out of it by being so relentlessly, mechanically heavy-handed, thwacking you over the head. Just as sometimes a churro is just a churro, sometimes a tennis ball in your pocket is just a tennis ball.
At match point our chaps, shagged out and glistening, both leap into the air – but instead of going for the ball, they drop their racquets and embrace over the net, while Zendaya cheers. An ending so feeble and absurd that I laughed out loud.
Though this may just have been relief that this long, drawn-out, slogging-snogging match of a movie was finally over.
