Challengers; or, the Modern Discobolus
Short-haired, vibrant, cold, sexy, and yet every bit as confused and empty as Louise Brooks’ Lulu, Zendaya brings to this spring breaker of a movie the life force of an insatiable, voracious flapper, and her own brand of suggestive gaze evokes as much bluff as Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson, so much so that her screen presence here almost seems in grave peril of indebting to these foremothers, and as a result staying trapped within a defined type. But that’s not what happened. Justin Kuritzkes, the novelist and playwright-turned-screenwriter, gave just enough room for her to find her own frequency, allowing her to give her own interpretation of the character and to transcend beyond the mean-spirited surfaces of her personality.
With all the unrealistically clean skin grease make-ups and the erotic drips, she defines her magnetism, which isn’t just sultry, with a kneeling posture that gives her a head’s advantage over her male prey (one sitting against the bed, slumped and legs-crossed, with his head half-buried in his knees and awkward laughters, and the other lying on the floor, loosened up, with an inquisitive smiling face glowing jovially like a lantern, radiating sexual energy up and down his muscled hull), or an ostensibly condescending, contemptuous glance, where there’s just enough difference in taste and mood for us to tell which of them she gave it to, or any other such behavioral cues that give her personality brushes of colors what the narrative alone couldn’t.
And these colors aren’t light, exactly. This film is, in every sense of the word, like a professional crime flick. Echoing the fateful choicelessness in The Godfather and Heat, no character here is really good, or willing, at doing anything else. Trapped between the unfulfilled aspirations of their youths and the impending doom of a midlife crisis, they find themselves imprisoned by their obsessive egos and fears, nourished further by the toxic culture of professional sports, in which only one thing matters: winning. If it means giving up what they’ve known, what they’ve been doing their whole lives — competitive tennis — then they might as well be dead. Little did they know, they already are… long before the finish line.
“Tennis is a relationship.” This is what Zendaya’s Tashi Duncan tells Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), and herself. It’s the antidote for her cavity, that total disinterest in anything and everything unless when it’s about tennis, and the game. It’s almost schizotypal: she can’t seem to get around to the romance, so she must think of love in terms of a tennis game, always seeking offense or building up defense and never letting her guard down. This pathological preoccupation seems nearly inhuman, except it’s real and pervasive in the gilded jungle of professional sports, where players will die before letting go. And eventually, they break like an overstretched spring under high pressure. And that’s what this film is about: the elastic energy, right in that fleeting instant when the spring breaks, a split second magnified and elongated into eternity — foreshadowed throughout, and yet we haven’t the least idea as to exactly when. It’s the anticipation, the dread, the excitement. Everything hanging in balance. The glass breaks any second.
The atmosphere is druggy, though it’s less LSD than PED, with the burning sensation of drinking liquor. Under the high voltage of an electronic musical, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross had no intention to stop, lest the characters do. Every beat and rhythm must end in an abrupt whack and must start like a massive wind wave swiftly but steadily engulfing the entire shore. They fill the picture up with electricity and irresistible exuberance, on anabolic steroids: there are no bottoms allowed in the fluid dynamics of this particular love triangle, only tops, with their respective thirst for conquest of the other two, deserve to win, in romantic terms or otherwise. And the triangle is really that: a full triangle, not only between Zendaya and the two male leads but also between O’Connor and Faist, within whom an undeniably gay undercurrent is reinforced by a countercurrent in the other, back and forth — as in tennis.
But Faist is only a top when he’s facing O’Connor, and even that has to be an imitation: he wants the latter’s flagrant overconfidence for himself more than his own fragility. Blonde, with an angelic and youthful face, the adolescent Captain America is desired by Zendaya largely because she knows that he’s the one out of the two who plays by the rules that she can dominate more readily. O’Connor is the more masculine and the more smug. His radiance is of a blend between the Travoltan sharpness and the Pacinoan insolence (or let’s put it this way: if I were gay, I would sleep with him, even if he’s a bearded bum finding dates just to have a place to sleep).
Growing bored to death of Faist’s fading confidence in himself and his commitment to the games, a confidence that originated out of the pubescent need to compete with O’Connor, Zendaya was able to rediscover herself in O’Connor, and in her quarrels with him, whose strategy for getting to her now involves asking her to become his coach and extend his career. Both Faist and Zendaya need O’Connor to get back on their feet, and likewise is the other way around. Yet initially, when they were together years ago, she couldn’t stand his more casual attitude towards tennis, and her beaming grin suddenly turned cold as she practically jumped out of his bed in the middle of a foreplay for a yoga practice. And she’s never admitted her fault when she broke her knee in a career-ending injury during a match that afternoon, where she couldn’t control her anger from her fight with O’Connor and lashed it out onto her body.
The dynamic among the three of them contradicts itself, as each one tries to top the other at the same time they give the other a hand; through their disdain and hatred for each other, they were able to find their passion and compassion, and through their passions and compassions for each other they find disdain and hatred. They felt insecure when alone, even when in two, so they tried to save the dying fire within themselves together — three at a time. If only the themes of commercialization and professionalization, being the things that stifled the once personal passion in the first place, were also as developed.
By stylizing bodily motion, Guadagnino has crafted his iteration of the discus thrower:
You know, like athleticism and the body in motion, when you see a sport being played, for me it has nothing to do with eroticism. I also believe that eroticism has nothing to do with the notion of perfection. And the opposite is true: sports is all about the pursuit of perfection. I think the beauty of bodies doesn’t need to be just erotic. The beauty of bodies can be human; it can be about the sheer excitement and the possibilities of movement — the possibility of the bending of the body into different shapes. I think there is more that you can see in bodies than the actual eroticism.
… And so I made a point that I had to be really dealing a lot with the fragility, the tactility and the sensuality of bodies. But I think it’s a mistake for a filmmaker to see a body as solely sensual: there is also movement, interaction, physicality and the clash of bodies.
— An interview with David Jenkins
Behind the first of its kind in the art of sculpture, Myron of Eleutherae had immortalized a figure not in any sense conceivable before him: as a pure figment of the artist’s imagination, it’s not after anything taken from any known narrative (personal, historical, or mythological). It was to the ancient world of Greece what L’arrivée d’un train was to us: though in actuality suspended in time, our image of the immovable nude athlete appears as if he’s only stopping temporarily, concentrating, gathering all the power before unleashing — a pendulum that has exhausted its kinetic energy in midair, with an increasing accumulation of potential energy as it slows to a stop before swinging back to the equilibrium point with the help of gravity, and eventually to the opposite side with the help of its remaining momentum. Despite being aesthetically proportioned with a sense of detail that’s never before seen, the pose is realistic only as an illusion. It’s in fact an unnatural pose for the throwing sport, because it’s about something larger than the sport: the mathematical beauty of the human body at a precise moment in time (as if captured on a still photograph) and its seeming potential for motion. It’s romance. And it’s style.
That moment in Challengers came at the end, after O’Connor and Faist engaged in an intense back-and-forth, with world-ending implications for each of the three characters in terms of their relationships. In an insanely stylish sequence of Altmanian zooms and Abramsian pans, we follow our perspective shifting from the POV of one of the three characters to another, to that of the flying ball, and then to a top-down angle of the characters, and finally to an angle buried beneath the court with the court itself becoming transparent — the surroundings have disappeared, it’s just the two of them, their rackets, and the ball. We felt every hit. With Sayombhu Mukdeeprom as the DP and Marco Costa as the editor, the two players moved ever closer and closer to each other, to a point when the ball no longer even bounces on the court before it reaches the rackets — it’s so elevated that it ceased to be about the tennis match — and eventually bumped into each other in midair as they try to catch the ball, ending in a compassionate hug, as Zendaya jumped out of her seat, orgasmically exhilarated, for both of them and for their game.
The three characters, by giving up the match with each other simultaneously, had won a three-way prisoner’s dilemma. It may be only momentary, but with the film ending on that note, we see their true feelings for each other captured, suspended in time — enshrined, eternalized… immortalized. They’ve broken through the commodification of their lives and relationships. As one of the most controlling and calibrating auteurs today, Guadagnino may have created the perfect sports thriller, with a seesawing, but never collapsing, balance between hyper-kineticism and suspense, one reinforcing the other. Potential viewers with heart conditions be advised.
★★★★
