[Ed. note: This post goes into detail about Challengers, the arc of Zendaya’s character, and the movie’s sex scenes. Spoilers ahead.]
Challengers’ first foray into people’s minds was threesome-forward. With the post-chorus chants of Rihanna’s “S&M” blaring — “Na-na-na, come on” — the first trailer showed us teenage tennis champion Tashi (Zendaya) inviting two yearning tennis boys onto a hotel-room bed, kissing each of them, letting them kiss her, then leaning back on the mattress, smiling. Sex sells, and Challengers looked like it was setting itself up for Ticketmaster-style surge pricing.
Challengers, ultimately, doesn’t have these three horny sports prodigies seal the deal. That kissing session is about as far as Challengers’ sexual content goes, give or take an awkward hookup. But that hotel sequence is the most important scene of the movie, setting up everything there is to know about Zendaya’s Tashi — which, of course, sets up everything you need to know about the movie.
The night defines the lives of Tashi and the duo she calls her “little white boys,” the rakish Patrick (Josh O’Connor) and the softer Art (Mike Faist). After feeling their eyes attempting to devour her all night at a post-match party, Tashi comes to the hotel room to play with her food. She immediately starts bouncing them — and their enchantment with her — off each other. It’s a manipulation as much as a seduction, as she confirms they’re both into her, gets them to admit they once jacked off together (independently and across the room from each other, they stress), then beckons them to the edge of the bed.
She kisses Art, then Patrick, then pulls them both onto her, letting them kiss up her neck before they all kiss each other. Then she pushes their faces together in front of her, just like she’s playing with dolls. As they passionately kiss, Tashi leans back, admiring her handiwork. Then, after a quiet smirk to herself, she leaves.
It’s precoitus interruptus — all promise, no pelvis. The trailer promoted Challengers as a sex-soaked story, but the actual movie seems almost childish in limiting the threesome action to a short-lived makeout session. Which is the point. These are children play-acting at the adulthood they’ve been primed for. And in a way, they’re right. Everything these characters are and eventually will be is there in that hotel-room encounter, swapped between them just as much as spit.
Throughout it all, Tashi is the guiding force. Tashi gives the movie its thesis, that tennis is best understood as a relationship. Challengers picks this idea up and runs with it, letting the tennis matches fill the hedonistic void, and adopt the kind of visual language a sex scene might. Over and over, director Luca Guadagnino and writer Justin Kuritzkes interrupt sex with tennis, and have tennis take on the affectations of sex. What happens in one tends to say something about the other. Tashi is upset when Patrick won’t listen to her tennis talk during a hookup, and climbs off him after he asks if they can just not discuss tennis for a moment. She only starts dating Patrick first because he wins a singles match against Art, because, again, what she’s interested in is some good fucking tennis.
In sex — as in tennis — the boys try to play along with her, but it’s clear they’re not really on her level. And the world wilts along with her enjoyment when she isn’t satisfied on the court. She and Art have a professional, strained relationship, both as coach and player and as husband and wife. Though she’s the star of the movie and the mastermind behind the Challengers match, Guadagnino lets the camera focus on Art during the opening sequence, as if to equate Tashi’s attention and the camera’s eye. It’s a sensation mirrored by the way she’s shot head-on during her heyday, as if she’s the only one worth watching on the court. It’s the same way she’s positioned in the “threesome,” as the center of attention, the object of affection.
In a way, Tashi’s focus in that hotel room is totally different than it is on the court, and everywhere else. But it’s also exactly the same. What she wants is a good match, and she’s used to being the one in command of that. She pulls the boys together out of her own sort of youthful joy and amusement. It’s for her titillation, and it’s telling: She isn’t pushing for eroticism in a choreographed way, nor is she lost in a moment of ecstasy. Tashi can see the whole court before they’re even out of the locker room, so to speak.
She indulges these exact same impulses throughout the movie, but particularly after her career-ending injury. After she loses her ability to play, those instincts become stunted — the ways she’s able to live vicariously through Art and other players can’t have the same effect. Her impulses have become a tool for survival, and it’s hard to find the fun in that. Everything feels a little more desperate, and a lot colder.
But everything that happens in that hotel scene comes back around, including Art and Patrick’s relationship with each other. Through her prodding and machinations, she pushes the boys together for smooching, and they seem to find something outside of her involvement, just like they find a way to connect during the Challengers match all those years later. (It’s telling, too, that the Challengers match eventually gives the boys the same centered close-up treatment that Tashi received during her glory days — even down to the way the camera captures her on the sidelines of the match.) The result of Tashi’s manipulations is a return to form, a chemistry that none of these three has ignited since that long-past moment in the hotel room. The end of the movie is both part of Tashi, and beyond her. It’s electric, erotic, and — most important to Tashi — it’s some good fucking tennis.
Challengers is in theaters now.
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