Challengers

“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; But when I became a man, I put away childish things.” —1 Corinthians 13:11

“With thy brawls, thou hast disturbed our sport.” —Shakespeare, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, Act II, scene 1

Luca Guardagnino’s “Challengers” presents a disjointed world, one dappled with superficial personalities, wayward passions, and most insufferably, hollow angst. Awash in blinding tennis whites and muted passionless reds, the film is emotionally colorless. Its predominant tone is flesh which begins pink, toned and sweat-drenched, but ends up sallow and drier than a desert.

“If you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.” —Romans 8:13

Guardagnino has made one menage-a-trois film after another, and all of them, especially this one, have a sun-soaked David Hockney feel that sparkles at times, but too often turns gray and dusty. Desire seems to be Guardagnino’s motivating force, but his is a corrupting force, one that shrinks his characters rather than one that moves them to greater heights.

Abraham and Sarah and Hagar had a relationship that was troublesome and took a toll on them and their children, but in the end, they were chastened by their trust in each other and in God.

Guadagnino never gives his characters a chance at reflection or atonement; by the end of their wayward sojourns, they are left lost and wanting. The teenager weeping in front of a fireplace at the end of “Call Me by Your Name” and the wife’s resigned stare as she drinks her dead husband’s blood at the end of “Bones and All” are lost souls, ghosts of what they were and might have been.

Zendaya, a one-dimensional actress, seems an odd choice to play the lead character, Tashi, a star athlete turned coach and a femme fatale. At times she comes close to pulling off the former, but she makes mush of the latter. Her inadequacy as a vamp is evident from the start when she declares: “I’m no homewrecker,” as she drops in on a friendship that she obviously intends to wreck.

More a franchise fixture than an actual screen star, Zendaya hasn’t the artistry to balance the elusive charm of the female side of a love triangle with that side’s need to be contradictory and inconsistent. Zendaya lacks the allure and the just-under-the—surface danger that allowed much better actresses to turn menage menace into magic. Watching Romy Schneider in “La Piscine,” Jeanne Moreau in “Jules and Jim,” and Maribel Verdu in “Y Tu Mama Tambien” make Zendaya’s turn, by comparion, look shapeless and hollow.

Tashi was once a teenage tennis pro. After suffering a career-ending injury, she gives up playing the game and resigns herself to becoming a coach. Her only client is her husband, Art, played with aw-shucks befuddlement by Mike Faist, whose over-use of the F-word fails to give his boyish softness a sharp edge. His cheekbones, shot from every angle conceivable, are the only hardened things about him.

Art’s pensive passivity seems out of place in someone choosing to play such a competitive sport, and that may explain his current losing streak. Tashi’s solution to her spouse’s declining fortunes is to enter him in a long-shot tournament, one that will match him with his former best friend and Tashi’s one-time, and later recurring, boyfriend Patrick. Josh O'Connor plays Patrick, and unlike his co-stars, comes close to delivering an actual performance. His “seen-it-all” impish squints and his “sure, why not?” smug smile give his character a comic edge. And a foreboding one. He’s as disarming off the tennis court as he is on it.

Being both wife and coach to the same man is one of many of Tashi’s incongruities. Wouldn’t objectivity on the part of both coach and player be compromised? A lot of the plot of the 2021 film “King Richard” has the parents searching for the right tennis coach for their daughters. They knew better than to take on the job themselves. Both had a sense of what Kashi and her charges do not: The closer you get to something, the harder it is to see it clearly.

Another enigma is Tashi’s need to dominate. Not content just to eat the apple, to expand her experiences, and to become her own god, she tempts her weak male counterparts to do the same. She styles herself a serial dater and a serial bed-hopper, preferring a doubles match to a singles game. Why go from one guy to the next when you can have both guys at the same time?

The decadent and over-the-top homoerotic subplot, one that swells like a leech on a bloated but dying host, is Guadagnino’s stock in trade, but he once again fails to make sexual fluidity feel natural and, even more absurdly, make it a conquering force. This chess board dance feels out of place in a story about sports, one in which everyone seems oddly off guard and open to the surprise of an out-of-nowhere serve.

The film goes back and forth in time much like a tennis ball that traverses a court, but it’s a bouncing ball that repeatedly lands outside the lines. As the movie progresses, the ball itself and the racket that smacks it meld to become the drama’s point of view. The whirling, and at times invasive and incomprehensible, camera movements give cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom a chance to choreograph a tour de force visual display, one that might have had more heft if it was filmed in 3-D, but it’s ultimately show-offy and distracting, an unnecessary addition to what is already over-done and over-long artifice.

The score is equally as jarring. Most of it consists of blaring techno-pop whose only advantage seems to be its tendency to muffle the mostly absurd dialog.

“Challengers” deconstructs the sports saga, and despite its designer façade, has a bargain basement core. The film emasculates the athletic hero, reducing him to someone without spirit and, therefore, without a true sense of self.

C.S. Lewis spoke about how taking away our spirit reduces us to just our appetites, and that leads to a sad future for men and for women:

“We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”

Tashi, Art and Patrick have appetites that devour their spirits, erode their loyalties, and keep them from setting and achieving honorable goals. They lose to each other and to themselves when they compete for what is not meant to be competed for: friendship, love and faith.

Guadagnino has made a movie of flash and fancy, and in the process exposes a lot of flesh (the nude locker room and sauna scenes are pointless, needlessly graphic, and devoid of the mystery and dignity that a human body innately represents), but no real emotion and certainly no gravitas that we come to expect from great sports competitors or the joy we get from watching them play.

Instead, we get a mangy tennis ball that is hit with more venom than force, but fails to land inside the fault line. “Challengers” could have been an inspiring sports drama or a cautionary tale about reaching too high, but it goes out of bounds and stays there. Its defeat is less agonizing than it is annoying, and pointless.

• Sex: Extreme
• Nudity: Very Heavy
• Vulgar/Crude language: Very Heavy — appoaching 50 F-words, S-words (several), B*tch (several), Crude words for female parts
• Profane language: Very Heavy —
• Violence: Moderate
• Drugs/Alcohol: Moderate
• Occult: Moderate
• Wokeism: Mild

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