Challengers: Mini Film Review

Tennis rivalry, a love triangle, Zendaya at the centre of both.

The biggest issue with Luca Guadagnino's CHALLENGERS is his over reliance on aesthetic, gratification via many innuendos, intense camera focus on the characters without actually focusing on the characters in respect to story, which makes the film, in the end, veer towards melodrama, only to result in lack of a meaningful and satisfying conclusion. 

All of Challengers' many faults stem from Guadagnino and the story he chooses to tell, instead of the story he could have told. The story we get is of a love triangle that becomes the inevitable end of the friendship of two best friends. Art and Patrick (Mike Faist and Josh O' Connor) meet Tashi Duncan (Zendaya)—a young rising tennis star—when they are young, who, in short, crashes their party. The story is told between the past and present: a tennis match between Art and Patrick in the current day— Art who is now married to Tashi, his manager— and a look at a timeline of their history dating back thirteen years. 

Both the told and the untold story has Tashi at the center of it: Tashi, the self-proclaimed homewrecker, and Tashi, the failed tennis star. The story Guadagnino chooses to tell is the former, and while there is some meat to it, it constantly feels overly dramatized and ends up happening to think it has a sense of importance rather than actually being important. The other story is teased: Tashi, the tennis player with a failed career, who by managing her husband's career, lives out her dream through him, even though she does not love him. But Guadagnino ultimately forgoes this in favor of the former. And the former, in the simplest terms, fails to be enough.

Guadagnino stuff the film with constant, little sexual teases, snuck in at any opportunity that Art and Patrick appear on the screen together, which boxes the film in a manner of sorts and makes it seem like its focus is giving the gays something rather than telling a solid story. The only thing that's maintained is the drive to keep watching, and what kept me was not his choices, but seeing what the intent behind the film was in the end. Seeing what could be achieved and where he could take it. 

The camera work and editing somehow do not do the most to support the film. Because while there is some great camera work, there are some equally lousy ones as well. The most interesting directorial choices were particularly in the tennis match scenes, where I constantly felt like the ball was passing over my head and near my face, and I was simply astounded by how they managed to capture that. Those were probably the most intense moments of the film for me. The editing on the other hand felt too sloppy many times. The score left me divided because while the choice of featuring heavy dance electronic tracks felt like a bold step, I cannot say it worked all the time. And other times, it felt divided with itself about what it wanted to do. 

All Zendaya's performance does is further my outlook on her being just an okay actress. For a lead role, she had very few moments and it lacked the sort of edge and bite that was expected from it, which I thought it had. I was not really let down, as I was not expecting much, and she had already delivered a much better performance with less screen time in another film earlier this year. The Josh O' Connor buzz fails to become real for me, this being my second performance I've seen of him. Mostly decent, but like the Zendaya performance, there was no punch to it. Once again, Mike Faist is the star in a film where he's not the lead, and even far less properly utilized that it's almost aggravating.

I found Challengers to be quite underwhelming and Luca Guadagnino too in over his head trying to elicit oohs and ahhs rather than delivering a solid story. All the teasings come across as rather forceful and excessive, and I know it's all intended, but really, at what cost?

Score: 3/5