Challengers

Tennis makes for great documentaries, from William Klein’s masterful The French to Barney Douglas’ portrait of the tortured superbrat, McEnroe. But when it comes to dramas, there’s something about the repetitive back-and-forth nature of the sport that convinces filmmakers that it’s a sport perfect to convey sexy melodrama and devious intentions.

It is not. Let’s just accept that it’s an excuse to drink Pimms, eat strawberries, and look out for silly hats at Wimbledon. Let us also just accept that the eternally heavy-handed Luca Guadagnino should be swatted away from making movies with anything approaching a metaphor.

Moving away from horror after the lumpen Suspiria and the vacuous Bones and All (less a film, more a Gucci ad riffing on Western vampire classic Near Dark), he rolls into the courtside thriller with all the sex appeal of a gym sock and a lousy script by Justin Kuritzkes, the poor man’s Whit Stillman. It’s trashy eurosleaze with none of the sumptuous debauchery.

The setup looks like a typical rich mouse/poor mouse tale, with superstar Art Donaldson (Faist) slumming it at a low-level tournament in New Jersey, facing off against burnout Patrick Zweig (O’Connor). In the stands is Tashi (Zendaya), Art’s wife and manager, who must understand tennis at a deeper level than anyone else because when the crowd looks left, she looks right. The narrative whipsaws back and forth to their first meeting at an earlier tournament, when Patrick and Adam were the bright young things of men’s doubles and Tashi was the blazing teen star whose light is snuffed out by an on-court accident. Across the 13 years (and it feels every second of them), they frot and fume and conspire and engage in increasingly absurd conversations about the nature of tennis.

The age of the actors is an undoubted issue, as they are required to play the trio across a dozen-plus years of interweavings, trauma, love, and loathing. As the teen Patrick, O'Connor has big “how do you do, fellow kids” energy and always looks in his thirties, while Zendaya is utterly unconvincing as a manipulative thirtysomething. Only Faist pulls off the transitions from the gulping Adam’s apple bravado of Art’s college years to his sullen maturity as an Andy Roddick-esque also-ran, and that’s not enough. Oh, and if you were hoping for the troilism implied by the trailer, prepare to be disappointed. Guadagnino seemingly thinks he’s being a tease, but he’s just dry humping the audience. Fun for him, not so much for anyone else.

So let’s talk about the sex. Challengers has all the eroticism of a worn-out sneaker – which may be your thing, no kinkshaming here. That said, Guadagnino does seem very happy to display his own peccadillos, with self-indulgent fetishistic overtones ramped up to deliriums rarely seen since Bob Fosse was behind a camera. Sweaty male forms with 3% body fat receive Beau Travail levels of adoration, whether it’s anything to do with the narrative or not. However, the director then cools off any heat with sequences that are either idiotically hilarious or hilariously idiotic. Either way, they are devoid of anything like nuance, although there’s a scene of Art and Patrick chomping on each other’s sugary churros that would make John Waters cringe at the lack of subtlety.

It’s all captured with comically awful cinematography from Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (Call Me By Your Name, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives), a DP of such proven caliber that none of the terrible decisions can be put down to ineptitude and therefore must be the result of deliberate choices. Balls fly at the audience like a tacky 3D gimmick, crowd shots meant to highlight the central trio lose them, and the final rally between the boys is a balls-eye POV disaster too ridiculous for words.

Even the score from the Oscar-winning duo of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is a disappointment, seemingly and inexplicably pilfering Pink Floyd’s “On the Run.” It’s honked at the audience at alarming volume, sometimes obliterating the dialogue. If only the sound team had pushed heavier on the faders, because there were scenes when I wished that the mix would shove the eye-rolling script completely off court. And, let’s face facts, nothing here is going to beat hearing David Bowie’s “Time Will Crawl” on a theatre-level sound system. So, there’s that going in Challengers’ favor. Aside from that, it’s just double fault after double fault.