I’m not going to lie. Like everyone who buys a ticket to Luca Guadagnino’s latest movie, Challengers, I was there to see one thing: Zendaya in a threesome. (If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ll know what I mean).
Whoever tells you they’re watching the movie for the tennis, or because they’re Luca Guadagnino fans — is lying.
Look, we’re all perverts. Voyeurs. That’s the beauty of cinema.
What I didn’t expect was to see a portrait of a modern woman — a semi-bildungsroman of a relentless and ruthless character in her pursuit of sports glory.
After the string of infantilised and doll-like female characters of last year (2023 gave us Pricilla, Barbie and Poor Things) Challengers is a refreshing take on female agency. No pink skirts or puff pastry sleeves here.
Zendaya plays Tashi, a fiery tennis player with killer instincts on the court. Even before going pro, she is signing lucrative sponsorship deals and making everyone around her swoon with libidinous hunger.
She’s caught the attention of two male tennis players — best friends Art (played by Mike Faist) and Patrick (played by Josh O’Connor), who circle her like a pair of salivating dogs around a BBQ. When they meet as teenagers, the trio form a quick and fervid bond. Both Art and Patrick desire Tashi, but she only wants the better tennis player.
The movie inverts the traditional linear chronology of a movie told in flashback. Yes, there are flashbacks, but each time we jump to the past, it’s a slightly different time. The whole movie cuts from a present-day match, where Art and Patrick are playing in a high stakes tournament for the first time in years, to their days as teenagers, and after the devastating injury which permanently puts Tashi out of competition.
Present day sees Tashi married to Art (though she had initially dated Patrick when they were teenagers) and they share a young daughter. Tashi is now Art’s coach, managing his schedule and dictating almost everything he does on court. He is her avatar, pursuing the glory that she was cruelly denied after her career ending injury.
Tashi is a woman who’ll do whatever it takes [for her husband] to win. She is ruthless. She barely smiles. She’s clearly unhappy. But she’s not after happiness. She’s after a win. She wants to win. She is a character driven by a need to win — she has a single-minded, uninhibited, unapologetic and shameless pursuit of winning.
She knows her power, and knows how to wield it. There was something deeply gratifying about seeing a woman who is clearly smarter than the men around her — reflecting the world more precisely as I know it to be.
There are so few examples of female characters in Hollywood who are doggedly ambitious, and who aren’t interested in love, romance, sex, or marriage; women who are driven by an unrelenting desire for something that has historically been a male-pursuit. (Winning, sports)
“He’s not in love with you,” Art says to Tashi, referring to Patrick, whom she is dating in the years preceding their first meet-cute.
Tashi replies indifferently — “What makes you think I want somebody to be in love with me?”
The truth is — tennis is Tashi’s true love. And when she’s on court, even as a spectator, she’s experiencing the exhilaration, the heat, the energy and the fervour of what one typically feels when one is, erm, having sex. I mean…making love.
No longer able to participate in said act, she has resolved to watch the erotics of these two men competing against each other. For Tashi, the attention from just one of these men is not enough. She basks in watching the two men going at it. Their love for each other is something that continues to sustain her. She is fuelled by their energy and synergy together.
In Challengers, tennis is sex, and sex is tennis. The writer, Justin Kuritzkes [Celine Song’s husband] has displaced all the erotic drama of inter-personal relations between lovers and friends onto the sport of tennis. The result is an immensely sexy movie, with a propulsive soundtrack that will leave you feeling very, very aroused.