In the Flesh: Challengers

Guadagnino’s always been an odd duck for me, recognizably freaky in his preoccupations, but too tame and visually restrained to get me fully onboard with his execution. Challengers is easily my favorite thing he’s done to date, but it suffers from the same lifeless visuals and mediocre, directionless scoring that have derailed so many of his films. The recurring low, listless pulse of vaguely electronic music that underscores major moments of interpersonal tension feels anemic for something that seems geared toward goosing the audience’s pulse. This thing is screaming for a Reznor and Ross-style nail-biting anxiety engine. It’s also gloomily, lifelessly desaturated and visually flat. Shot compositions are indifferent more often than not, colors are bland and textureless. Nor are Guadagnino’s more experimental shots much to look at. First person shots of tennis rackets, disorienting tennis ball’s-point-of-view ricochets, it all reads more “ambitious Youtuber” than “frantic, psychosexually-charged contest of wills”.

In spite of its significant failings, though, Challengers is thrillingly horny and sharp-edged. Zendaya gives a great turn as relentless, driven former tennis star Tashi Duncan, whose mind games and sexual tension with the loose-limbed, reckless Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) and the retiring Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) provide a strong backbone to the largely gripping and surprisingly funny film. The two men are each directionless in their own way, privileged boarding school boys whose lives are so far removed from real stakes and consequences that tennis functions as a kind of substitute for human existence, a way to experience the conflict and loss absent from their insular, moneyed world. Tashi is the restless force that spurs both men to action, not just by inspiring their desire but by allowing them to act on their repressed desire for each other. She’s like a goddess of battle demanding worship from her celebrants; her final triumphant, furious shout of “Yes!” as she finally succeeds in spurring her men back to their competitive heights is a thing of savage beauty.

The film’s refusal to delve into childhood trauma is admirably against the grain from a structural perspective. We don’t need to know what made Tashi so driven, so focused on victory and struggle. We don’t need to know why Patrick won’t fall back on his parents’ money. We can infer. We can guess. What we’re seeing in the present is the point, and it makes for compelling viewing, even if Guadagnino seems unwilling to push beyond titillation and into the ugly emotional forces pushing these people together and pulling them apart. It brushes along the surface of the sublimated homosexual urges concealed within the elaborate rules and rituals of professional sports, and there’s a lot of  real heat to that, but at every turn the sensual sleaziness of it is held back by lack of craft. It’s a good film, often hot and very funny, but there’s a great one hidden under all its failings.

EDIT: The composers ARE Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, they just made something I don't like for once.