Challengers Fucks

on desire & Guadagnino's (tennis) balls

I saw Challengers on opening night with a crowd of young women in Girlfriend Collective athlesiure dresses at the AMC Burbank 16, a hub for entertainment industry assistants and east side gays — one of LA’s hornier crowds. Much like opening weekend of Barbie at The Grove, I’d bet good money that our theater was running low on Diet Coke. From the moment the Lights Began To Dim, we were hysterical. Luckily, Challengers met us right where we lived.

From the beginning, I was transfixed by the way the makeup team had applied bruises and scrapes to all the tennis players — as any real athlete would have, but I’d never seen in any of the (admittedly few) sports movies I’ve seen. This sense of bodily realism continued throughout the film, not just with Zendaya’s horrifying knee injury, but with the way she applied lotion haltingly to the site of the scar years later. And the sweat. Jesus Christ the sweat. A fellow pervert friend and I exited the theater debating whether they’d thickened the liquid with something, and what it could have been to make those slightly-opaque drips move so realistically in slow motion. Forget the chocolate syrup in the Psycho shower scene, give me the Challengers sweat liquid any day.

The film’s visual language has an un-self-conscious lasciviousness only achievable by a 52-year-old gay director of European origin, which is to say shots linger on Zendaya’s twinks’ calves and quads and hands and, in a shot that elicited screeches in the theater, Mike Faist’s ass on a hotel bed, without needing to explain themselves. Why are we objectifying the boys? Because it’s fun. Why is the soundtrack a pounding techno-disco masterpiece by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross? Because it fucks. We’re here to be horny, let’s fucking go.

Let’s talk about Josh O’Connor, who I’ve been all about since he played a gay sheep farmer in God’s Own Country (I have a very specific kink for men shearing sheep, see also: Kevin Bacon in I Love Dick.¹). His tennis bad boy thing in this movie (and purple shorts) was… everything I needed. Don’t think I didn’t notice the bisexual settings on his Tinder when he was swiping in the locker room (an excellent example of gratuitous and unnecessary full frontal male nudity that I loved). O’Connor is an actor who brings such a sense of ease and realism to whatever he’s playing, and Patrick Zweig was no exception. He infused the role with so much charm you often forget he’s a privileged rich boy cosplaying poor. Throughout the film you can feel that he’s eternally at odds with his upbringing having given him everything on a silver platter, and the raw drive needed to become great at tennis.

Tweet Author: @filmvirgo

Speaking of tennis greats, Zendaya’s Tashi Duncan brings another crackling sense of desire to the screen, playing off of the loss of her career stopping before it ever began. When they’re young and she’s just won at the U.S. open juniors, Patrick tells Art (Mike Faist) that she’ll “make her family millionaires” with the endorsement deals that are to come. She tells the boys she’s going to go to college before going pro (this is where she gets her life-ruining injury) and Patrick fixes her with a scamp-y stare, saying “Oh, I get it. You’re making us wait for you.”

Tweet Author: @Ali_sivi

But the way the film plays out, Tashi’s life unspools into one prolonged ruined orgasm/cucking scene wherein she has to watch Art live out her dream, despite his lack of passion for the sport. Tennis, she waxes poetic, is a relationship. And Art simply cannot commit. I think Faist brought some great stuff to the role, but for me Art was a bit of a horny dead spot (despite being somewhat endearing as a person), a mere hurdle between Patrick and Tashi’s chemistry. Or maybe I’m just not into him because I too am a bottom.

Tweet Author: @Ali_sivi

But seriously, in a time when the sex scene is allegedly dying, Guadagnino is out here with defibrillator paddles, jolting it back to life with peeks of thigh and the suggestion of an Eiffel Tower. However? Throughout the film there is no true “sex scene” to be found. There’s never a sequence of awkward thrusting or simulated orgasms, or sheets playfully obscuring the camera. Instead, Guadagnino zooms in on the psychological, emotional side of sex: the boys threeway kissing Tashi with exposed tongues on their pushed-together beds, Tashi smack talking Patrick during foreplay (one of my favorite horny moments on film in some time). Not to sound like a prude, but these scenes are almost hotter than sex scenes, because what we’re seeing is a real exchange of energy, not a performance of what’s not there. A take I never expected to have! And it takes a lot of talent on behalf of all parties to make a lack of sex (whatever that means) hotter than the (simulated) real thing. Has Guadagnino drawn me into a brainy analysis of realism in film when I opened this Word document to talk about boy thighs and peeks of briefs and sweat beading around the white polo collars of their shirts? Europeans.

I would even go so far as to posit that the entire film is a sex scene. I mean look at Ross and Reznor talking about the soundtrack scoring process:

“I wish I had his notes,” Ross said of Guadagnino. “His notes were so fucking funny on what each piece was meant to be.”

“Oh, yeah,” Reznor said. “‘Unending homoerotic desire.’ It was all a variation on those three words.”

131 minutes of unending erotic tension is a feat, if not a masterpiece. Had any misstep interrupted the build, we would have felt it. It would have been laughable. We would have left not with sweaty palms but with teary eyes. Instead, Guadagnino uses film to do what it does best: put you in the shoes of its protagonists. In this case? Hot, sweaty, sexy tennis shoes. Really, it’s all about empathy. And human feeling. And taking up your racket against the Sisyphean demands of living and saying “Today — I am horny.”

So I guess what I’m saying is… Challengers for Best Picture?

Tweet Author: @rosedommu

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1. Yes, I know I am the sheep.