β˜… β˜… β˜… β˜… Β½

Love – love.

Luca Guadadigno’s mastery of form will surely be remembered by history. He is sensual and evocative in a way that other picture-makers envy (few can photograph the human body — capture passion — quite like he does, from the intimacy of Call Me By Your Name to the contortionism and dancing in Suspiria) and no less admirable on a technical level:

His latest creation, Challengers, is one of those films where everything is spiffily conceived and impeccably executed (particularly a tennis match near the end that had me staring slackjawed at the screen), at least from a formalist perspective. But we also get three irresistible performances, a story of great passion and intense sexual energy, plus a techno soundtrack by Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor that you’ll feel in your bones. Most importantly (depending on who you ask), it is a film that realizes that tennis is far and away the most erotic sport.

We begin at the very end, as tennis legend Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) intently observes a tennis final between Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) and Art Donaldson (Mike Faist). Then we go back, as two story strands tell us of the history that these men have with Tashi as well as each other — one with the characters as teenagers circa 2006; one with them as adults.

We cut back and forth between these two story strands — where Tashi will be involved with one or both of these men to varying degrees — as well as the climactic game itself. I will spare you the metaphors about a tennis ball getting struck back and forth through time, but I will applaud the effort in making sure we always know where we’re at in the characters’ timelines, from the visual and auditory background details to the way the characters look. Also, in the vein of last year’s Past Lives, it takes the time to include era-accurate UIs for the various apps we see. In one of the 2006 scenes, a character also mentions Facebook, which another character seems to take as gibberish.

If there’s one issue with Challengers, it’s that the film’s nonlinear plotting occasionally seems a bit over-explained, with captions denoting the temporal and geographical settings of the scene when there’s already ample work put into the hairstyling, set design, costumes, makeup, and other context clues to tell us when and where we are. My theater-going companion theorized that these captions were a studio decision, although I recall a few of them gelling well enough with the framing that Guadadigno must’ve had them in mind while shooting.

Beyond this, and a few sound effects that are over-emphasized in the mix (though I understand wanting to flex such delicate and detailed foley work), Challengers is a flawless film. When aficionados fans speak about the eroticism of tennis, it goes deeper than you might think, and using that sport to tell this sort of story is nothing less than brilliant.

Zendaya in ‘Challengers’.

And of course, the tennis scenes themselves are smashingly done — intense, encapsulating, and often intimate whilst being technically impressive, with balls hurtling right at the camera at great speeds in what I must assume are VFX shots (unless Guadadigno can really afford to break that many cameras). Reviewer Houston Coley described his sensation during these shots as being the same as what audiences in 1897 must’ve felt watching The Arrival of a Train at La CiotatΒ for the first time. A certain other shot has been compared to Bee Movie — if you know, you know.

The use of rigs and split diopters during these scenes is singularly inspired. To make things better, we also get some truly potent super-slo-mo shots, achieving the energy that Rebel Moon pretends to have. I even admire the environmental details; this film makes the best, moost moody use of stormy weather since the heyday of BΓ©la Tarr.

Last but not least, if you just want to watch a steamy film involving hot people, this one is for you (in particular, Mike Faist made me go “I never knew a mix between John Mulaney and a young Mathew Lillard could be so charming”). It may surprise you that this — what many have called the sexiest film of the year, if not the decade — contains no single sex scene.

To some this is refreshing and my companion voiced his preference for cinematic intimacy like this over, say, the highly explicit fornication scenes in Poor Things. I believe it depends on the movie — I love the almost sex scenes (the most we get is foreplay and at least one “just got done” scene) in this movie because of how legitimately sexy they are; I love the actual sex scenes in Poor Things because they (or many of them) are hilarious, and work well for that type of movie. I think films can be sexy while showing the sex too, but the approach of Challengers is pretty perfect. Less is more, sometimes, and it’s hard to imagine that this film could possibly be any more sexy.

I am once again forced to steal a passage from a Letterboxd reviewer. Quoth Bryan Espitia: “Everything is sex, except sex, which is tennis.”

β˜… β˜… β˜… β˜… Β½