GLR September-October 2024

FILM

GrandSlam

I S IT POSSIBLE to combine tennis and tragicomedy? Is it possible to combine both with techno music (compliments of Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor) and a throuple involving two men and one powerful woman? Director Luca Guadagnino ( Call Me By Your Name ) manages to pull it off with Challengers , in which he again explores the blurry line between friendship and sexual intimacy. Challengers stars Zendaya (already a Gen Z icon because of her role as Rue Bennett on Max’ lurid Euphoria series) as Tashi, Josh O’Connor (a young King Charles III on The Crown ) as Patrick, and the lesser-known Mike Faist (a stand out in the role of Riff in Spielberg’s West Side Story ) asArt. They form the three corners of a love triangle. What qualifies Challengers as an LGBT film (emphasis on the “B”) is the much-discussed scene in which Patrick and Art, eager to score

ends up denying the men the three-way they so desperately desire and coyly bids them good night. The men are left frus trated, but Challengers doesn’t reveal how they relieve that built-up tension. In another scene, the two share a phallic-looking churro while discussing their idée fixe: Tashi.

C OLIN C ARMAN

CHALLENGERS Directed by Luca Guadagnino Amazon MGM Studios

She remains the figurative referee throughout this sports ro mance, and in the final tournament, the ATP Challenger tour, the audience is left guessing. Not to spoil the ending, but one of the men conveys, through code, that he has slept with Tashi, an effort to throw the whole triad off balance but also as a means of showing that both men’s fantasies have been fulfilled. When tennis superstar Serena Williams was asked by the Times tode code the ending, she gave Challengers her stamp of approval but spoke to many viewers’ frustration with this film: “I wanted more of an ending. ... I told Zendaya, ‘Listen, is there more ?’”

She went on to describe the bond between player and coach as some times “codependent.” I read Tashi’s elation in the film’s final shot as a sign that she has outwitted the men once again, but who can say for sure? That Patrick and Art passionately em brace, jumping over the net to hug and cry, is a clear sign that they will go on loving each other de spite, or because of, Tashi. In sharp contrast to Tashi, Patrick and Art are less dumb jocks than they are marionettes in her strange game. The tennis court, like the chess board, serves as the synec doche for romantic gamesman ship. “You’re not a tennis player!” Tashi shouts at Patrick. “It’s a re lationship! It’s an open relation

Mike Faist, Zendaya, and Josh O’Connor in Challengers

ship!” She is playing on the multiple meanings of the word “player.” The men, meanwhile, are less willing to outplay each other and speak in softer tones: “I miss playing with you,” one tells the other. By the end, Patrick and Art are difficult to tell apart. It be comes harder and harder to know whom Tashi is truly playing— because she sees both men as means to her ends. Regardless, what all three lovers have in common is a ruthless desire to win, though ultimately Tashi calls the shots over a thirteen-year af fair. This is the inscrutability of desire that has long obsessed Guadagnino. Whether the men are friends or foes is left unclear. What is clear is that such ambiguity lies, for Guadagnino, at the heart of human sexuality. By resolving so little, Challengers re veals so much.

with Tashi, desperately wait for her in the hotel room they share. Upon arrival, she interrogates the pair about their own romantic history, and smiles with perverse delight as she goads the men to make out in front of her. The kiss has been a long time coming. “You seem like brothers,” she says, reclining on the bed behind them. The men then confess that they were each other’s first sexual partners. Patrick drunkenly admits that he taught Art to masturbate. As the film unfolds, however, they become not playmates but the bitterest of rivals. Ever the master manipulator, Tashi Colin Carman is an assistant professor of English at Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction, Colorado. A recent article can be found in Romantic Women’s Writing and Sexual Transgression .

September–October 2024

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