REVIEW: The tennis threesome drama with Zendaya at the centre is a celebration of sexiness and sport<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you\u2019ve seen anything online about Luca Guadganino\u2019s latest film Challengers<\/em>\u2014it\u2019s likely about one scene: Zendaya\u2019s Tashi in a shitty motel room slyly asking Josh O\u2019Connor\u2019s Patrick and Mike Faist\u2019s Art to join her on the bed. There\u2019s only a moment\u2019s hesitation when Art asks \u201cwhich one of us?\u201d before both jump on either side of her. We see them each kiss Tashi and then it cuts to her watching something between Patrick and Art with a deliciously evil grin on her face. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s the scene that\u2019s made people wildly anticipate the tennis throuple drama since last summer, before its release date got pushed due to the simultaneous WGA\/SAG strikes. Now Challenger<\/em>s is finally in theatres, and thankfully Guadganino has made one of the most bisexual films in recent history. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Tashi Duncan is a brilliant young tennis player on the brink of stardom when she meets Patrick and Art as teenagers. But an unfortunate injury changes her life trajectory\u2014leading her to coach Art, her now husband, who is now a famous tennis player. He\u2019s in a rut, so she enters him in a low-stakes challengers event, a match that allows players to qualify for the bigger tournaments, to knock him out of it, but when they discover that Patrick, Tashi\u2019s former boyfriend and Art\u2019s former best friend is playing at the challenger as well, all of their old wounds and sexual tension come roaring back. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Guadganino directing a film about sports at first might seem out of left field for the prolific director, but at its core, Challengers<\/em> is about desire and the many ways it manifests. And there\u2019s no director who understands desire better than Gudaganino, whose previous films explore the subject through multiple great Tilda Swinton roles (I Am Love<\/em> is a must-see), cannibals in Bones and All <\/em>and Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet eating the peach in Call Me by Your Name<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Even before Art and Patrick meet Tashi\u2014there\u2019s tension between them. They have been best friends since they were young and attending the same tennis academy. They are constantly touching and bantering when we first meet them. Their dynamic feels very bisexual\u2014do you want to be them or fuck them?\u2014which continues throughout the film. It\u2019s even revealed that Patrick taught Art how to jerk off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Their will-they-won\u2019t -they?<\/em> dynamic is also present with Tashi. When they first see her play, Art grabs Patrick\u2019s thigh in the stands when she makes a point. Their collaborative lust for her leads them to approach her after Patrick quips that he\u2019d let Tashi \u201cfuck him with the racket\u201d at a party. Tashi\u2019s entrance into their twosome just highlights the not-just-friendly dynamic between the two\u2014especially when she continuously says that she doesn\u2019t want to homewreck them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Eventually she does\u2014dating Patrick at first, which doesn\u2019t immediately change Patrick and Art\u2019s dynamic, despite Art\u2019s ongoing worship of Tashi. For Patrick, he even tells Art that his continued longing and light sabotaging of his relationship with Tashi makes it \u201chotter\u201d for him. But when Tashi breaks up with him\u2014Art doesn\u2019t choose his longtime best friend, he chooses her, which leads him to money, fame and getting Tashi. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But even after the pair have been estranged for years\u2014when Art\u2019s married to Tashi and is a famous tennis player and Patrick is a mess\u2014they still have that dynamic and a crackling chemistry. No scene proves this better when the two finally speak again, both nude in a sauna, with Trent Reznor\u2019s sexy techno score pumping in the background. As they bicker, Gudganino lingers on their bodies, zooming in on sweat beads and thick, tennis-trained thighs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Gudganino knows what he\u2019s working with\u2014Zendaya, Faist and O\u2019Connor in one film is a bounty of beauty and he\u2019s eager to show it off. He never shies away from highlighting the beauty of his cast\u2014we see Tashi in a silk slip, lotioning her legs, putting extra effort where the scar on her leg from her career-ruining injury remains. Gudganino pans across a locker room filled with naked tennis players\u2014as Patrick flips through Tinder, mostly seeing women, until a man briefly appears on his screen. Gudganino ogles everyone\u2019s muscular bodies, celebrating their sexiness and the sport. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Speaking of the sport\u2014Challengers<\/em> is perhaps the sexiest movie of late without a ton of sex: there are steamy makeout sessions and post-coital conversations, but so much of the sexiness and bisexual energy of the film comes from the tension between the three, much of which is conveyed through tennis. In a scene when Tashi and Patrick are making out, foreplay for her is clearly talking about tennis, in particular, rightfully criticizing Patrick\u2019s technique, which bothers him. And the same goes for Art: when they finally kiss in an Applebee\u2019s parking lot, it\u2019s after discussing the sport. <\/p>\n\n\n\n So when Gudganino films the integral challengers match between Art and Patrick\u2014it\u2019s not just tennis\u2014it\u2019s watching their relationship play out\u2014which is how Tashi describes her take on the game early in the film. With Tashi anxiously watching the two play, it\u2019s as close to a threesome that the movie will give us. These three people are all clearly in love with one another and none of them can figure out how to express it. It shows in the ways that Gudganino films the match between Art and Patrick; it\u2019s a game that only they can understand, and it\u2019s a game that is fuelled by years of past resentments, love and sexual tension. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s a testament to Gudganino\u2019s continued excavation of the ways in which desire shapes us and how deeply he\u2019s able to understand the very queer dynamic between the three of them, which is primarily shown through their tennis-playing. After seeing Challengers<\/em>, there\u2019s one question that remained, for me at least: Do I want to be them or fuck them?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" REVIEW: The tennis threesome drama with Zendaya at the centre is a celebration of sexiness and sport<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1196,"featured_media":264856,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"editorial_slug":"10","_editorial_slug":"10","exclude_from_latest_block":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,10],"contributors":[2856],"topic":[75,136,109],"clients":[],"series":[],"timeliness":[60],"editorial_format":[2137],"type-of-work":[2536],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264865"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1196"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264865"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264865\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":264908,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264865\/revisions\/264908"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/264856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264865"},{"taxonomy":"contributors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributors?post=264865"},{"taxonomy":"topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/topic?post=264865"},{"taxonomy":"clients","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/clients?post=264865"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=264865"},{"taxonomy":"timeliness","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/timeliness?post=264865"},{"taxonomy":"editorial_format","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/editorial_format?post=264865"},{"taxonomy":"type-of-work","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xtramagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type-of-work?post=264865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}