- YEAR: 2024
- DIRECTOR: Luca Guadagnino
- KEY ACTORS: Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, Mike Faist
- CERTIFICATE: 15
- IMDB SCORE: 7.3
- ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE: 88%
SEX SCORE: 4/5
✔️ It is the greatest film of 2024 so far. Of course it’s rewatchable!!
✔️ Do I want to fuck the cast? YES! Absolutely, definitely. Of course!!
✔️ I have wanted to fuck tennis players for a long, long time but this certainly added to those fantasies!
✔️ And while a lot of this film is about the destructive power of sex, I do think it’s sex positive as nothing is judged, none of the sex feels wrong; perhaps dangerous and misguided, but not wrong!
❌ But it doesn’t pass the Bechdel test. There are barely any named female characters and, while Tashi does speak to her named daughter, Lily doesn’t really talk back…
As always, this contains spoilers so watch the film before you read on…
STREAMING: Such is its success that this is still in a few cinemas (last I checked!)! Otherwise, streaming as video-on-demand on Amazon, Apple, Sky and YouTube (buy from £13.99) For a full list of streaming options, check out JustWatch.com
Quick apology for the unscheduled summer holiday! But it’s accidentally worked out pretty well because I released Wimbledon during that tournament and this latest review of another tennis movie is being released during the US Open so lets pretend I planned it this way!
I wrote about Wimbledon in my last review at the beginning of the summer largely because I really, really wanted to write about Challengers. I felt that I ought to write about Wimbledon first as it’s one of my favourite movies and it’s been on my list to write about since the beginning of this blog because I love its sweetness and its warmth…which are not words you would use to describe Challengers! That movie is a RIDE. And it may have supplanted Wimbledon as my go-to tennis movie. Because who really needs sweetness when you can have a dirty fuck?!
Challengers is my favourite type of love triangle movie – one where each side of the triangle wants to fuck the other! This isn’t a two-guys-fighting-for-one girl film; this is a film about three people who have dated and married and fucked (or at least want to fuck), and there are sparks flying all over the place! It tells the story of three junior tennis players – Patrick (O’Connor) and Art (Faist) who are doubles partners and Tashi (Zendaya) who is the next big thing in women’s tennis! All three of them have an…encounter when playing juniors at the US Open, ending in a hot and horny three-way-kiss. Declaring that she will date whichever of them wins the juniors championship, Tashi creates a riff between Patrick and Art as she pits them against each other, and ends up dating Patrick. Sadly, she suffers a career ending injury immediately after they argue and Patrick wasn’t there for her; Art was. So she marries him instead! With Tashi as his coach, Art has been pushed to massive career success but is now stalling and keen to retire. Tashi tries to motivate him with a few match wins and enters him into a challengers tournament – one usually reserved for much lower ranked players. Good plan…except he meets Patrick in the final. And it is fucking electric!!
Before I talk specifically about Challengers, I want to make a couple of comparisons to Wimbledon as it highlights both why this film is great and why that film suffers in comparison. Because Challengers understands tennis. I really enjoyed the reviews from some of my favourite tennis journalists who all agreed that the tennis play itself was more artistic than accurate, but that the movie absolutely understood the tour. It knows tennis players and their weird habits – such as hanging out at the Applebee’s after the Cincinnati Open. It understands how isolated players can be on the court but how interconnected their lives have to be on the tour. How personal relationships can spread into the court, for good and bad. And it understood the stakes involved for tennis players, and the gap between those at the top and those at the bottom. Unless you’re in the top 100, professional tennis is an absolute grind of constant travel to win the prize money necessary to fund that travel and entry fees. The Tennis Podcast ran a great episode in April 2020 where they interviewed Liam Brody, then ranked 211 in the world, about how the tournament cancellations necessary during the pandemic may have meant that he couldn’t afford to start playing again. Without the prize money, he couldn’t afford a coach, a physio, a wider support team, equipment; he couldn’t afford entry fees and plane tickets and hotels… It’s an expensive sport that only rewards success.
And I liked that Challengers emphasised that success, in tennis and perhaps in general, isn’t always related to talent. When playing juniors, Patrick is the better player. It’s why Tashi likes him, and why he won the junior championship! He has more natural talent than Art, but he doesn’t develop it. He doesn’t progress. It’s highlighted (with a sledgehammer) in his strange serve technique – an amusing quirk before he became a professional and now a habit that should have been smoothed out by a high powered coach. In contrast, Art has worked hard. He has battled and learned and become a huge success, even though he perhaps didn’t have the same natural talent!
So it means that the stakes in their challengers level final are very different. Patrick needs to win because he needs the prize money for food and board – by this point, he’s essentially a sex worker on the side as he’s using Tinder dates to find accommodation each night. (Quick aside – am I the only one who gets annoyed by rich people living in poverty because they don’t want to ask Daddy for help? Patrick is clearly from a wealthy family but doesn’t want to ask for help so is living in his car. His reasons for this aren’t nearly explored enough and so it’s just annoying!) It’s also a tournament for players of Patrick’s ranking – he needs the points to increase his ranking so that he can qualify for other tournaments to earn more money to get into better tournaments etc etc. Whereas Art can qualify for any tournament he wants; he’s here for an easy win against players who aren’t nearly as good as him to boost his confidence. He needs to win because it would be hugely humiliating for a multiple Grand Slam champion to lose a challenger tournament. He doesn’t need the money; he doesn’t need the points. He needs the win!
All of this tennis accuracy and intrigue made the film amazing, but what made it great, what made it a film that I want to watch again and again, and what Wimbledon didn’t understand, is that Challengers knows that tennis is sexy. In fact, in this movie, tennis is sex! For such a hot, erotic movie, there really aren’t many sex scenes. That tension is released on the court instead. And I LOVE it!
You can probably tell that I am a huge fan of the sport generally so perhaps I’m biased, but I really do think that tennis players have the hottest bodies in sport. I started writing this before the Olympics but I saw nothing that changed my mind! Rugby players might have better thighs, swimmers might have better arms, cyclists might have better calves…but tennis players have it all and exactly the right balance of muscle and tone. They look incredible. All of them! Sadly, this balance isn’t allowed to work as beautifully for the women players – they all look absolutely stunning but too often have had to sacrifice strength to reduce their muscle mass, rather than be criticised and ridiculed for being too muscular, as Serena Williams always was. Goddamn the patriarchy!
I also think that tennis is the hardest and cruellest sport around – the length of the matches, the physical stamina involved, the periods of explosive energy interspersed with extraordinary precision, and the scoring system that means you can win after losing almost all the points and yet losing one wrong point can ruin everything. Federer recently spoke about how he only won 54% of the points in his matches and yet won over 80% of those matches. It’s a brilliant and fascinating sport, and it relies so heavily on the strength and weaknesses of your opposition, on the person playing with you on the other side of the net.
And Challengers gets it – Tashi even describes tennis as a relationship: ‘For about fifteen seconds there, we were actually playing tennis. And we understood each other completely. So did everyone watching. It’s like we were in love. Or like we didn’t exist. We went somewhere really beautiful together.’ The connection between them is about more than sport. The Queer Movie Podcast described this as Tashi’s kink but I disagree. It’s an intrinsic part of tennis. Of course it’s sex!
And it’s hot – literally and figuratively. There is just so much sweat! The players are dripping in it, literally glistening with exertion. They’re panting and dripping and wiping their eyes and using their bodies, and having sex with their clothes on.
Other than that teenage three-way kiss, the tennis really is the only sex on screen. (Unless you count some suggesting churros eating, which I absolutely am!) And that kiss is barely on screen for long as the point of the scene is to watch Tashi enjoying watching them. The zoom into her face, and her satisfied smile as she watches what she has created, is so joyful. She’s in control, she’s winning!
But other than that, no one really wins in Challengers. Not in their relationships – Tashi and Art’s marriage is essentially over, and Patrick isn’t exactly lining up to be a replacement – and not in tennis. The film finishes with an orgasmic shout of ‘come on!’ but no indication of who actually won the point. But winning isn’t the point – it’s the competition, the desire to be challenged and to meet their match that is the attraction: ‘These competitors only feel alive when they’re bound together by the mutual intimacy of being edged to the break points of their desire.’
I think that’s why I loved this film so much. It keeps drawing us deeper and deeper into their messy lives, while teasing and tempting us with a resolution and release that never comes. It’s sex, but it’s kinky sex. It’s dark and drawn out sex with no guarantee of satisfaction but a promise that keeps us coming back for more! ‘It’s like a tennis movie, but it’s not really about tennis,’ Zendaya told IndieWire. ‘Tennis is really just the outlet these characters use to express their chaos.‘
Who knows what will happen next, and I don’t really care. Watching that final rally, as Art and Patrick pushed themselves harder and harder, closer and closer, grunting and panting and sweating and building the tension higher and higher, I too became breathless and tense. I too felt caught up in their drama, and I loved it!
Could this movie actually be porn? For me, it definitely definitely is!
NEXT TIME… Breakfast at Tiffany’s
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