Challengers: Zendaya’s tennis love triangle serves up racquet-twanging steaminess

All right, who’s for mixed doubles? Cinema has brought us love triangles in the world of professional tennis before – perhaps most memorably in George Cukor’s Pat and Mike and Woody Allen’s Match Point. But the sheer racquet-twanging steaminess of Luca Guadagnino’s new entry in the canon makes its forerunners look like games of back-garden swingball.

Challengers must be the most purely pleasurable film of the year so far. Like a great tennis match, it’s a clash of sleekly honed bodies and minds, and the question of who finally comes out on top is irrelevant to the fun of the struggle itself.
Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist star as Patrick Zweig and Art Donaldson, two former doubles partners and best friends who find themselves vying for the affections of Zendaya’s Tashi Duncan, a goddess of the American youth circuit. The two aren’t McEnroe and Borg, but they strike a similar yin-to-yang balance: Patrick is the showboating hothead with the wolflike smile who can’t wait to go pro, while Art is the steady technician, methodically building his career on a sporting scholarship.

As for Tashi, she’s like no one and nothing else around: lissom, pristine, glowingly beautiful, and a ball of lightning on the court. The friends’ slack-jawed reaction to watching her play for the first time looks completely ridiculous, though after noting this down I realised I was pulling much the same face myself.

It opens at the final of a mid-tier challenger tournament, where Patrick and Art face each other for the first time in years, as Tashi looks on from the front row of the crowd. From this narrative baseline, the plot shuttles back and forth through time, whistling into the past then back to the present, sometimes in elegantly arcing drop shots, sometimes eardrum-splitting smashes.

Screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes expects us to keep up, but despite its complexity his structure is intuitive and smooth, and we soon understand that this ostensibly low-stakes clash is in fact the climax of this trio’s professional and amorous lives.

What makes their chemistry so good? Desire zings through almost every gesture – look at how O’Connor self-soothingly holds a Coke bottle to his lips while gazing at Tashi across a garden party. Or how Patrick and Art paw at each other’s faces while sharing churros in a cafeteria, dusting one another’s cheeks and hair with sugar in the process. (When was the last time a Hollywood film made you want to reach, in a good way, for a wet wipe?) As for the ménage à trois teased in the trailers, it’s mild in terms of bodily mechanics, but has real formative heat, locking these characters on a course that’s both wildly self-destructive yet fires all three to new professional heights.

And how’s the tennis? Perhaps as tense as cinema has seen since Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, with scalpelly editing, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s counterintuitively perfect house-music score, and camera angles that had me regularly ducking to the side of oncoming shots. The staging becomes significantly wilder in the grand finale – a final-set tiebreak, naturally – in which the preceding two hours of sexual tension finally zaps down to earth.

“Come on!” Tashi yells, involuntarily. Or at least I think she does. I couldn’t swear it wasn’t me.

15 cert, 131 min. In cinemas from April 26

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