Lust, Love, and Lobs: The Shallow Spectacle of "Challengers"

Luca Guadagnino's latest tennis themed sojourn in to matters of the desire deploys sex as both narrative driving force and visual pleasure. What's not to like? Well...

Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor in Challengers

Sex on screen is hardly a new frontier in the battle of ideological intercourse. In today's polarised culture, the ethics and aesthetics of visual carnality are, of course, fodder for tribal invective. On one side, we can identify the "Neo-Puritans", a curious amalgamation of a traditionally conservative sensibility and a progressive yet strident wing of leftist cultural thought. An alliance of Fs and Ws, perhaps? United in their moral righteousness, this coalition champions a censorious coda: that sex scenes are intrinsically problematic and fundamentally unnecessary. Representations of sex are deemed permissible only when they serve a clear narrative purpose, as if the very notion of pleasure for pleasure's sake were a sin against the gods of storytelling. Such refrains invoke the echoes of H.L. Mencken's observation: that Puritanism is "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."

In opposition to this joyless moralism stand those we might call the "cine-libertines." This group acknowledges, if not unapologetically promotes, the notion that the allure of cinema lies not only in its ability to tell a compelling tale but also in its power to arouse. As such, they are defenders of the erotic, advocating that onscreen sex possesses an essential value, transcending mere narrative utility and dispassionate observational beauty. Indeed, this often draws from the influential strand of psychoanalytic film theory, which is built on the maxim that there is libidinous pleasure essential to cinema's allure. Scopophilia, voyeurism, fetishism… Metz and Mulvey have provided the compelling sense that cinema's power lies in the ability to watch without being watched.

Thinking through Luca Guadagnino's latest film, Challengers, within this context is to explore a work that straddles the dichotomy of the licentious. The film chronicles the sexual and emotional entanglements of two male tennis players, childhood friends turned competitors, and their female counterpart, whose own predicted stardom is cut short by injury. Considering the sterility of much mainstream cinema, it is refreshing to see a film that "challenges" conventionally hierarchical sexual dynamics in a way that actively invites an erotic gaze. Indeed, one could argue that Guadagnino quite deftly deploys sex as both a narrative driver and visual pleasure. Both the "Neo-Puritans" and "cine-libertines" should be on board.

Films about ménage-à-trois have a unique little space in cinema lore. Jules et Jim (1962) and Bande à Part (1964) probably defined the triangular relationship as a defiance romantic orthodoxy and moral conservatism, aligned with the political and aesthetic radicalism of the French New Wave. Contemporary works such as Y tu Mamá También (2001) and The Dreamers (2003) are explicit heirs to this idea. Of course, there are replete examples over the years that appeal directly to licentiousness, not to mention the threesome being a myriad category in porn.

Guadagnino's Call Me by Your Name (2017) showed the director's interest in symbolically rich, homoerotic romance. He seems to be attempting to invoke a sexually enlightened, European art house sensibility with this mainstream vehicle. Add in the tennis theme, which loads the narrative with the drama of competition and visual dynamism—the tennis sequences have a Guy Ritchie-esque quality —and a veritable star of the moment in Zendaya, who brings a unique type of watchability, and one can see why there has been critical approval. She perfect embodies the lithe power of proto-female tennis star (as a marketers dream, Emma Raducanu certainly comes to mind as a real world counterpart). Pointedly, through the viewpoints of the her two admirers we are encouraged in visual object as an amalgam of athletics/aesthetics and erotics. No problem in this context it seems, the issue of over-sexualising female athletes?

Zendaya in Challengers (Image: @zendaya/Instagram)

Yet, for a film where there is a lot going on in terms of the psychological triptych and the back-and-forth temporal structure, the result is superficially diverting rather than deeply emotionally engaging. The two protagonists, Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O'Connor, the best thing in the film), have a deferred homo-sociality into which Zendaya becomes the disruptor. "I don't want to break up this marriage," she says more than once (I think). Yet, in the key early scene, the unconsummated three-way, where the dynamics of the boyhood rivalry are laid bare, Zendaya's Tashi takes control of the clear sexual tension. In what appears to be a calculated move, she allows herself to be the conduit for the two men to express their sexual desire for each other, but leaves them both…dangling?

Still in flashback, the boys' sophomoric competition for Tashi is transposed to the tennis court. The more talented but less dedicated playboy Zweig wins essentially a playoff for Tashi’s affections. The more sensitive Donaldson becomes the third wheel until Tashi's burgeoning career is ended by injury, where his emotional "support" replaces Zweig's sexual potency. In the present, Donaldson is a top player coming to the end of his career, with Tashi as the coach/partner infusing him with the self-confidence to excel while living out her own unfulfilled career. Zweig is scrambling to make a living as a journeyman until a serendipitous rematch in a lowly tournament reignites the tensions between the three.

If all this seems rather contrived, that's because it is. Which isn't a problem if this is to be taken as fantasy melodrama. Indeed, there is a kind of Sirkian unreality to the proceedings. I found myself thinking, "Why are these people acting this way?" The more the movie proceeds, the less convincing the character motivations or actions become. In turn, the directorial intentions become more and more opaque. For all the sense that Tashi represents a post-feminist figure, sexually and professionally dominating, it's hard to see her reduced to a cipher of the mother/whore stereotype. The two male leads vie in a phallocentric battle for possession of Tashi. Alongside some obviously throwaway dick jokes and the kitschy symbolism, the relative size of the phallus is literally taken as a demarcation of masculine power.

Despite all of this, Challengers is still remarkably coy in its depiction of sex. There is a certain jouissance that comes through in the initial flashbacks, with youth, vitality, and sporting stardom fuelling a rather forced sense of polymorphously perverse curiosity. Yet after the initial bedroom advances between, the film seems to separate scopophilic pleasures into: 1) a quite straightforward, perhaps even conservative presentation of Zendaya as an object of gaze, and 2) longing close-ups of male bodies in framed homoerotic poses. The film is a homage to pert backsides, honed through hours of tennis drills. But body positions and towels are so strategically arranged to cover any rogue phallic offences. Perhaps there is a comedic intent here, but it reaches an Austin Powers level of ridiculousness. There is a certain timidity is assuaged by the filmmaker's penchant for heavy-handed symbolism. Instead of Chalamet's peach, we have O'Connor and Faist gobbling churros in extreme close-up.

All this, is at best good fun, at worst irksomely on the nose, particularly given that the ménage à trois at the centre of Challengers attempts to serve as a prism through which to refract the myriad ways in which desire can both liberate and ensnare. However, the film’s pleasures are surface ones. Guadagnino conjures a world of lush textures and saturated colours, his camera caressing the sun-dappled bodies of his actors with fetishistic glee. The matches are as well done as they could be. Along with the familiar angles of sporting spectatorship, the camera work takes its cue from boxing films, taking us inside the arena of movement and power. Indeed, one sequence is from the point of view of the tennis ball itself, being hammered from one side of the court to another in revolving disorientation. The action is driven by a pulsating techno soundtrack.

The ending perhaps encapsulates the problem with the film. The lack of a clear sense of outcome regarding who these characters are and what they want from each other leaves a sense that there is a lot that has gone on here, but it's difficult to know what it all means. Or what Guadagnino what’s it to mean. But maybe that’s to over think things when the libidinous eye should just be indulged.

In today's culture, the depiction of sex in mainstream films faces numerous problems. With the ubiquity of pornography, audiences have become desensitised to on-screen intimacy. Neither raw explicitness of adult films or the sanitised, mechanical soft-core simulation both have there own pitfalls Moreover, our unprecedented access to behind-the-scenes footage and filmmaking processes has made viewers acutely aware of the practical and political difficulties involved in shooting sex scenes. This awareness can make such depictions feel inauthentic and staged. Challengers does attempt to make sex both narratively necessary and an intrinsic visual pleasure, but it doesn't quite succeed on either count, leaving it stranded between "Neo-Puritans" and the "cine-libertines" in that particularly ideological rally.