Challengers Is Deliriously Campy Queer Fun

Niko Tavernise / Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures

Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers dares to ask the question: What if the music video playing on the TV at your favorite gay bar were a feature-length film instead? I mean that as high praise. The Italian director’s hotly anticipated tennis threesome movie is a deliriously campy queer love triangle set to a thumping techno soundtrack. It swaps out the infamous peach from Call Me by Your Name for a banana and, most memorably, a pair of churros to really drive home the phallic symbolism. Subtlety exists nowhere in its vocabulary, and honestly, thank Christ for that. It has been far too long since I watched something so distinctive, and so decidedly in love with its own point of view, that it actually altered my brain chemistry, but Zendaya and crew have pulled it off.

“Tennis is a relationship,” the actress posits in her role as Tashi Duncan during an early scene, when the rising athlete is still competing in the juniors division. She’s holding forth for a captive audience of admirers: Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), both of whom play tennis, and both of whom are in love with Tashi, with some asterisks attached. The wrench in this love triangle is that Tashi is not so much heterosexual as she is sports-sexual. (She may as well have said, “tennis is the relationship” because for her, competition is key to getting off.) When her own athletic career is later stymied by an injury, the boys became cathected avatars for her pent-up feelings of unfulfillment. Basically, Art and Patrick are her dolls, and she wants to make them kiss, which she does during the much-hyped ménage à trois moment.

What the titillating trailer didn’t show, though, was that Tashi leaves the hotel room after only a few minutes of making out because she’s ultimately less interested in fornicating than she is in which boy will win their match the next day. Not that Challengers doesn’t have sex on its brain — it most certainly does — but the most convincing chemistry in the film exists between two men who spend most of its runtime ostensibly despising each other: After Tashi dumps Patrick to marry Art, and helps coach her husband to tennis superstardom, the rejected player falls on hard times, living in his car, sleeping with women off Tinder because he can’t afford a hotel room, and, in one particularly hilarious scene, drooling over a spare half of a Dunkin’ Donuts breakfast bagel.

Some years later, when the frame story of the film takes place, an aging Art is struggling to win another major, so Tashi enrolls him in a “challenger” tournament, a feeder event for aspiring pros, as a confidence booster. Unbeknownst to Art, a down-on-his-luck Patrick has joined the tournament as well with the hopes of qualifying for the U.S. Open — a last chance to grasp his own thwarted tennis dreams. You can guess where things go from there: the two men, once best friends, must face each other on the court again, with Tashi literally on the center line.

Triangles are the strongest shape in the bedroom, too.

But what is so delightful about watching Guadagnino’s lovers this time around is that the director is less interested in how beautiful they look — don’t worry, sweaty abs abound — and instead allows himself to be captivated by their idiosyncrasies. Art is a determined but increasingly mopey presence, existing in some undefinable place between repressed homosexual in love with his best friend and hopeless straight man in love with a woman who no longer respects him. Patrick, who notably swipes right on both men and women, gives off a more chaotically amoral pansexual vibe: he shares Tashi’s thirst for conquest, but he’s too egotistical to accept her coaching.

The two men’s mutual fascination with Tashi is partly genuine, but Guadagnino makes it abundantly clear that it’s mostly a vehicle for their attraction to each other. (Fellas, is it gay to spend 13 years locked in an intense psychosexual competition with your tennis-school bunkmate? In this case, yes, it definitely is.) Hands grasp knees, insults are traded in a sauna, and balls of all sorts bounce across the screen. This is the horniest movie without a full-on sex scene you will likely ever see, and honestly, it doesn’t need one. Josh O’Connor eating that banana is hot enough.

What no words can capture, though, is just how fun Challengers is to watch. The cinematography is kinetic — at one point, the camera becomes a tennis ball, whizzing back and forth between rackets — and the bass-heavy electronic score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross kicks in at all the right moments, injecting even introspective scenes with a winking wryness. I am a quiet, even uptight, filmgoer and I found myself dancing in my seat throughout the two-hour-plus film, which felt, to quote Beauty and the Beast, “new and a bit alarming.” But maybe that behavior is only out of character for the person I was before I saw Challengers. Maybe I’m a person who dances now. Maybe I greedily eat my friends’ churros right out of their hands. Maybe I hear synth in my head whenever someone is trying to have a serious conversation with me. God, I wish. If only I could feel this way forever.

Get the best of what’s queer. Sign up for Them’s weekly newsletter here.

Originally Appeared on them.