
Since attending the screening of Challengers, I have spent a week and a half on the edge of congestion on thrusting a racquet, cursing, Bruin-style tantrum. Is Hawkeye working? Did they not see it? How for the exhausting length of huffing and puffing of Mahut-Isner practically every wild swing, every single one of the wild swings that were taken by Luca Guadagnino’s film, so much of them, managed to essentially miss their target and have gone out of shot by a country mile. Four-star reviews? Five-star reviews? C’mon now all my fellow critics, You cannot be serious.
These controversies I will admit are probably the only ones that I can’t argue against. The movie is a box office winner. And even if it may be offending some, it has stolen several hearts. It is even more mummified than the beloved Saltburn. There is a clear generational gap. I can understand how excitable younger customers, who have grown up on a pelvis-arithmetic diet of motion pictures, are so smitten with the sweaty glamour and faux sophistication of the film. It’s my senior-tour colleagues who I am looking at as I have hands on my waist with a puzzled look on my face. The film which these people have been applauding, from a distance, was in no way an instant masterpiece but rather indicative of the continuing infantilization of American Cinema. A Muppet Babies remake of Jules and Jim.
There is a possibility that some fans fell prey to the sense of extravagance that was incited by the film’s officiating referee, who handed out code violations as though they were regular issues. (In real tennis, those things breach the court’s conventions: illegal substitution in games or matches. Not so in Luca’s world.) Take those on board, and perhaps you will also take for granted how neither of the film’s male stars convincingly come off as the bulked-up jocks who are strutting their stuff across the secondary circuits of American tennis. Even at their most beaten down, Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick (Josh O’Connor) look like the socially awkward nerds of a thousand teenage comedies who giggle at their embarrassing stories of self-having.
And then there’s the Zendaya problem. Over her short life, Zendaya has been and done many things, brand ambassador, noted among the best dressed, the MJ in the middle of the whirling machinery of the Spider-Man films, and she’s still one of our best qualified It girls. The upside of being an It girl is that every script that’s doing the rounds in Hollywood would have already come to you first; the only downside is getting roles for which you don’t have the relevant qualifications, working mother, for example. The film does own up to this, nearly awkwardly whisking away Tashi’s daughter Lily AJ Lister with an iPad loaded with bluey videos. Step aside and make way for Uncle Luca’s Polysexual Fun Times, no strings attached.
For me, this is the place where Challengers lost everything: Lily, game, set, and match. True, it is about zippy escapism, but only until the end of the 20th century. With the turn of Bull Durham in 1988 and Tin Cup in 1996, it’s difficult to imagine any of the big studios throwing money at a sports comedy that deals with the reality of a competitive sport, fame, and being a parent. (That told the story of the father-son relationship, which, in the last decade of her brilliant career on the tennis court, was complicated for the tennis player, for example, by Serena Williams.) But Lilys give little attention to Challengers, and mother even less, except to gather the boys and a sticky audience in a room.
Let’s switch the focus on sex or rather the ludicrous conception that the Challengers had of it that I found, oddly enough, perfunctory and rather childish in its execution: it seemed purely stage-managed and choreographed without a trace of real desire. I kiss you; you kiss me, and now you two kiss each other. Such scenes are not so much sex scenes as stylized and overdone kissing scenes: children playing with a toy spin-the-racquet game. Challenger’s fresh-faced fumbling is the same marketing technique that is usually used to sell khakis and cola in USA prime-time television commercials much of the film looks like a tennis rip-off advertisement for some clothing, jewelry, or perfume line. Sex still works, even in this rather tame 12A style.
Guadagnino has grown to be a master at the hype and has included plenty of over-dramatizations which once again relieves him from understanding why he is a filmmaker in the first place. The thick mist created by the movie’s multiple loud-noted self-indulgences swirls around every last piece of fast food littered on the streets; he turns us around on the tennis court like we had a Slazenger logo on our bottoms. Here, however, is where Challengers gets into the hysterics of the porn and it involves several aggressive shots and cuts, a drunken fist pump in first-person view, and a noisy, terrible Reznor-Ross soundtrack. The sweat runs like sperm. But nothing is subtle and there’s no teasing, no shift to a plan B: it’s Boris Becker in a broom closet after losing his fight for a business. Bang, bang, that’s all folks.
All the remarks above present some dissatisfaction and require more. But how exactly does this Justin Kuritzkes-scripted throuple bear any relevance to last year’s Past Lives, scripted and directed by Kuritzes’s wife, Celine Song? Issues much? Tissues too, with respect of course as Kuritzes and Song seem to have a similar trait, finding such defecting and pointless characters. In Young-So’s terms, Past Lives presents these absent shells, to whom we as viewers must endow with our emotional whispers of what could have been. Achieving fullness through the absorption of viewers’ lust is said to be the hollow bodies of Challengers. Do not forget: the other ‘Kurtzkey’ depiction of Past lives Kornel was the author of a book called Boner. Challengers’ title as well as the ‘Punchlines’ for this thesis is marketing and is regarded quite differently from what it represents. But another title suggests itself: Balls.
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