“Cinema has brought us love triangles in the world of professional tennis before”, perhaps most memorably in Woody Allen’s “Match Point”, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph. “But the sheer racket-twanging steaminess of Luca Guadagnino’s new entry in the canon makes its forerunners look like games of back-garden Swingball.”
Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist star as Patrick and Art, tennis players caught up in a love triangle with Tashi (Zendaya), a former “goddess of the American youth circuit” whose prospects were felled by a knee injury. The film opens at the final of a mid-tier challenger tournament, at which Patrick and Art – who were best friends and doubles partners in their teens – are facing one another for the first time in years, while Tashi, now Art’s coach and wife, looks on from the crowd.
“From this narrative baseline, the plot shuttles back and forth through time”, and we discover that this ostensibly low-stakes match is in fact “the climax of this trio’s professional and amorous lives”. Like a great game of tennis, the film is a “clash of sleekly honed bodies and minds”, and it is, for my money, “the most purely pleasurable film of the year so far”.
“Challengers” marries “the sensuality of European arthouse to the sophisticated gameplay of goldenage Hollywood”, said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times. The result is an “almost ridiculously” sexy film that defies “the tired conventions of the Hollywood sports biopic”.
Zendaya is on form, but the intrigue at the heart of the film becomes wearisome, said Dan Hitchens in The Spectator. “Will she? Won’t she? Answer: she will, but never for long with the same guy.” The film might have been more enjoyable, too, if its characters weren’t so mean. As it is, they’re “borderline sociopaths”.
Out now in cinemas