When the trailer forChallengersfirst dropped on the Internet, there was one scene on everyone’s mind: the threesome. The potential spectacle ofZendaya,Josh O’Connor, andMike Faistengaging in what looked like the steamiest sex scene in recent history was enough to send people into a frenzy. This frenzy was only heightened when the film got delayed multiple times due tothe actor’s strike, leaving people to stew in their horny speculations. Imagine the surprise when the film would finally release withthe biggest box office openingof directorLuca Guadagnino’s career, all with…no sex scenes. Not one scene of fully engaged sexual activity, and yet it stilllived up to the promise of being the sweatiest and most sensually exciting wide-releaseAmerican theaters have been blessed with in some time. It begs the question: how does a movie make itself so sexy without ever resorting to depicting sex?
Challengers
Follows three players who knew each other when they were teenagers as they compete in a tennis tournament to be the world-famous grand slam winner, and reignite old rivalries on and off the court.
The Central Relationships of ‘Challengers’ Are Built Out of Control
From the moment they meet each other, Tashi (Zendaya) is in control of Patrick (O’Connor) and Art (Faist). Since they were all teenage wunderkinds on the tennis court when she was on her way to superstardom and the two boys were blazing a trail on the partners circuit — they are completely enraptured by her.She knows she has them in the palm of her hand right away andwastes no time enjoying the thrill of wrapping them around her finger, coyly setting the standard that whether they get to know her better is defined by their ability to beat the competition in tennis. Little do they realize how much that competition would trickle over off the court, since, to Tashi,everything is tennis, and everything she discusses and thinks about is actually about tennis. She can’t foresee either Patrick or Art being worthy partners for her unless they prove to her that they have it in them to go the extra mile for the sake of victory. But what is the definition of “victory” when that philosophy extends to outside the realm of sports?
That question is what makes that threesome scene so hot, despite only ever amounting to intense kissing. It’s a microcosm of the trio’s entire dynamic in action: Tashi flagrantly playing them against each other with the promise of sex while Patrick and Art trip over themselves, willingly treating their near-lifelong friendship as collateral damage. Keep in mind that, in the film, men and women don’t compete against each other on the tennis court, so Tashi isn’t even doing this as some form of psychological warfare to throw them off their game. When she maneuvers the situation by getting them hot and heavy enough to start kissing each other, she relishes the moment, sliding back with the widest of grins. In a sports sense, she’s “won,” finding satisfaction in their sexual submission.If you ask Zendaya herself, she’d say it’s that Tashi’s aware of how privileged the boys are compared to her, being white men, “so she enjoys f***ing with them about it.” So then, what would Patrick and Art get out of daring to tread such waters?
The Unspoken Attraction Between Patrick and Art Is A Masterclass In Staging and Writing
If Tashi is forever fueled by her need to thrive on the thrill of competition,Patrick and Art are motivated by their collective desire for each other and how they channel that desire into competition with each other. To watch how Patrick and Art constantly nip at each other’s heels, even when Tashi isn’t around, is to watch what would happen if the scenes of Edward and Jacob nagging each other with maximum homoerotic tension intheTwilight Sagawere done intentionally. A scene of the two guys eating churros shouldn’t seem that sexual, except for how aggressively close Patrick gets to Art, the way he chomps down on his churro while Art gingerly breaks his up into little pieces. The cherry on top is when Patrick grabs Art’s churro, eats half of it, and then offers it back to Art. For a filmmaker who’s turneda peachandliteral human fleshinto physical manifestations of the unspoken desires of the respective protagonists, this feels like Guadagnino is just giggling at the abrasive juvenility of Patrick’s antagonism that Art is oddly accepting of.
The difference withChallengersin relation to Guadagnino’s other films about hidden desires is thatthe nature of the relationships in the other films is overtly explored as the meat of the narrative. With Patrick and Art, the murky nature of their dynamic is buried so deep that it’s in the center of the Earth, except the tennis court is their Earth.As Josh O’Connor put it, “I think it’s Platonic and non-Platonic. I think they’re obsessed with each other. I think it’s stronger than love —[they] need each other in order to feel complete.” The final tennis match between Patrick and Art which serves as the centerpiece of the narrative becomes the closest thing the film has to a cathartic sex scene, with the grunts and whines of their racquet thrusts paired with a level of glamorous sweating that makesthe volleyball scene fromTop Gunfeel like a Merchant-Ivory production.
‘Challengers’ Ending Explained: Where Do These Three End in This Ménage à Tennis?
Who knew a three-way tennis match was possible?
Under Guadagnino’s direction, the camera not only makes this trinity of actors feel like plausible athletes, but it also makes them into glorious deities come to life, fetishizing their bodies in both the platonic and sexual senses of the word. Much like how a sex scene steadily gets more intense and rapid when building towards a climax,the final shot we see of Patrick and Art comes pretty close to literalizing,as Zendaya described it, “a metaphor for a lot of bigger [stuff]. For power. For codependency.“The metaphor of tennis as sex carries as much weight as it does precisely because the audience never experiences any sex scenes, thereby never alleviating the built-up pressure of sexual tension that the film has been building for its duration.
‘Challengers’ Is Brilliant In How It Uses Tennis As A Metaphor
The idea of treating tennis as one big metaphor for relationship dynamics is such a stroke of genius that it makes you wonder how no one has tapped into it before.While many prior romantic films involved sports, few have infused the very nature of the game into the mechanics of the central relationships.As screenwriterJustin Kuritzkesput it, “Tennis, by its nature, is a very erotic sport. It’s sort of the opposite of boxing, where you’re all alone, and you’re trying to spend the whole match touching another person. Tennis is about being all alone, and being at a distance from somebody, and tryingnotto touch them…There’s a deep intimacy and a deep eroticism in that, and also a lot of repression.”
That implication of eroticism, be it heteroerotic or homoerotic, is what makesChallengersso scintillating, despite never letting us see an actual money shot, so to speak. Sometimes it’s more fun to dance around an issue as long as possible and force the audience to wonder, rather than… blowing the load too early. Whiledepictions of fully satisfying sexual activity between adults should always have a place in cinema, it would have been overkill to include them in a film already so hopped up on the fumes of lust and the pure blood-pumping adrenaline of a proper conquest. When you have the synth bombardment that istheTrent ReznorandAtticus Rossscoreblasting at you underneath the dialogue scenes loud enough to make a standard couple’s argument feel like the final round of Wimbledon, an added sex scene would have felt completely redundant. Thanks to Luca Guadagnino’s refreshingly playful direction of Kuritzke’s script,Challengersutilizes melodramatic tropes to intelligently poke at what truly lies beneath people’s sexual desires. For Tashi, Patrick, and Art, none of them truly needed sexual interaction to satisfy their sexual desires, anyway. They had tennis.
Challengersis available to watch on VOD.
Watch on Apple TV+
