The twisty ‘Challengers’ makes tennis sexy

Luca Guadagnino’s latest makes great use of Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor

Director Luca Guadagnino’s new film Challengers plays like the famous Miami Vice/“MTV cops” anecdote, only if the napkin had said “sexy tennis movie.” 

It’s a film set in the world of tennis while also depicting years in the life of a love triangle among a trio of very beautiful young people. It’s what we’ve become used to from the director of Call Me By Your Name, A Bigger Splash, and Bones and All. 

It’s a propulsive, exciting film that does creative things with nonlinear storytelling and how it photographs the game of tennis- all with a typically fantastic score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.

 All three leads are outstanding in the parts and believable at different ages. The film successfully tells a complicated story about jealousy and mind games while keeping things sexy at all times. 

Also, I give the film credit for avoiding puns involving the word “love.” 

Challengers is set at a minor professional tournament in White Plains, New Rochelle, N.Y., focusing on three tennis stars who have seen better days. Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) is a veteran star on the downslope of his career, while Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) is a struggling journeyman who, as of the start of the tournament, is living in his car. Tashi (Zendaya), married to Art and his coach, was a former tennis superstar whose career was ended by a freak knee injury. 

The film travels back and forth in time, depicting how they met as young people and their entangled romantic histories. Various revelations from the past shed new light on the events of the present, which are built around a tennis match between the two men. 

Faist is best known for the Steven Spielberg West Side Story movie, while O’Connor played Prince Charles in the middle seasons of The Crown. Both are quite good here, believable as teenagers and weathered 30-something men. 

But this film belongs to Zendaya, in what’s her first real movie star performance. Sure, she’s been outstanding in everything from the MCU Spider-man movies to this year’s Dune: Part Two, but she shines here as someone who’s two different characters at different ages. 

The screenwriter is Justin Kuritzkes, the “Potion Seller” guy on YouTube, and also the husband of Past Lives director Celine Song, and presumably the inspiration for John Magaro’s character  (author of the novel “Boner”) in that film. Should we be reading into his seeming fixation on male-male-female love triangles? Perhaps.

Most of the great tennis movies of the last couple of decades have been documentaries, like Love Minus Zero, and two different ones about John McEnroe (McEnroe and John McEnroe: In Pursuit of Perfection.) There’s something about tennis that seems to inspire stylishness in nonfiction films.

The romance genre was previously attempted with Wimbledon, a more straight romcom with Paul Bettany and Kirsten Dunst, which arrived 20 years ago. King Richard took the Oscar bait route a couple of years ago, for some reason building the movie around Venus and Serena Williams’ dad; that movie is much better known for what happened at the Oscars than for anything in the film. 

I’m also partial to 7 Days in Hell, the HBO sports mockumentary from 2015, with Andy Samberg and Kit Harington playing a days-long tennis match. 

But Challengers is clearly the best non-documentary movie about tennis in at least a couple of decades.