★★★★

Sweaty, muscular and desperately horny, Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers lusts in the fashion of an old courtly romance. The emphasis is on the court – it’s a tennis film – but the romance is as pervasive as it is dripping in the erotic energy of unquenched climax. Every game is intercourse. As befitting the Chaucerian tradition, there are knights, jousts and a fair maiden worth fighting for. More modern is the youthful vibrance of the piece. Guadagnino’s cast are electric but it’s his own reinvention of point of view filmmaking that drives forth the avant-garde vigour.

Tennis is a relationship. Played well, it is sport’s ultimate communiqué of love. Such is Challengers’ central conceit and the starting, middle and ending point from which its story is born. Mike Faist (West Side Story) and Josh O’Connor (God’s Own Country) play boarding school bros Art Donaldson and Patrick Zweig. They’re a successful college doubles pairing but fairly unremarkable in their own right – initially, at least. Far superior a player is Zendaya’s Tashi Duncan, a hotshot newbie, poised for both tournament and marketed success. Tashi triangulates the boys’ bond but serves too as a conduit for the denied longing that aches between them.

Bookended by the unfolding drama of a 2019 Challenger meet, the film’s core is fractured across thirteen years of back and forth storytelling. It is only through exposure to the past that the intensity present tensions can truly be understood. Where the three-way conceit is straightforward enough, the power plays are less so. There are dynamics of desire, true, but a bitter undercurrent of class friction. While Art and Patrick owe their careers to bought education, Tashi’s prowess is entirely meritocratic. It is, moreover, cruelly stolen from her in a wincingly captured mid-game injury. Later, she will muse to Art that there is no child or old lady she wouldn’t have killed for a second chance. Later still, she will rile at the throwaway arrogance with which Patrick toys with the opportunities afforded to him: ‘You have a better shot with a handgun in your mouth’.

It is owing to the broad strokes simplicity of the narrative – in which Art and Patrick wrestle over their feelings for Tashi – that the filmmakers are afforded the chance to let rip on creative opportunity. For his part, Guadagnino handles his camera like a director possessed. His motion is dizzying, with viewpoints above, below and, in one remarkable instance, within the beating heart of play. Amusing sequences capture the side-to-side momentum of spectating heads, while others lose all sense of control, courtesy of rampant editing by Marco Costa, to thrilling but nauseating effect. There aren’t so many tennis films in the history of cinema but none before this have better captured the power, speed and danger of the ball in motion.

In perfect synchronicity, a synth-heavy score from The Social Network’s Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross ramps up the beat with well chosen electric notes and thunderous rhythms. Choral interludes may soften at times but the general pace is relentless and bombastically sonorous. While such heightening happens most frequently at the peak of gameplay, Challengers’ standout moments off court are privy too. These include a thunderstorm tryst, whirling in pathetic fallacy, and hotel-based engagement that veers wildly from expectation.

With barely a supporting player among them, Challengers is every bit the three-hander promised. Faist does well to elicit a painfully desperate need for sympathy as Art, while O’Connor nails the infuriating boyish charm as Patrick. It was the latter who taught the former how first to masturbate, telling one much of their relationship. Ultimately, of course, the film is Zendaya’s. So often the screen-teen, Zendaya is star and producer both here, carrying Challengers with the gravity of a talent very much entering the age of her acting maturity. As the film hits its climax, Tashi can but watch from the sidelines. Unfazed, Zendaya gifts the sequence a frankly extraordinary wealth of expression and nuance.

T.S.