Tennis provides background noise in Zendaya’s pointless love triangle

CHALLENGERS ★★
M, 131 minutes

Challengers is supposed to be about tennis. Cast as players on the pro circuit, its three leads speak of the sport with a fervour bordering on the religious.

But they protest too much. The tennis is just background noise. High-volume background noise. Every bounce of the ball resounds like a pistol shot, and the editing has a ricochet effect designed to obscure the outcome of every point. Director Luca Guadagnino does everything he can to distract you from the game as most of us know it – although you may occasionally glimpse the score in fine print in the corner of the screen if you study the action scenes with particular care. At the end of it all, I was half hoping to see a disclaimer stating that no racquet was harmed in the film’s making. The racquet abuse is brutal.

The main point of the exercise is sexual rivalry. Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) and Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) have spent more than a decade competing for the affections of Zendaya, who’s implausibly cast as Tashi Duncan, a tennis prodigy forced out of the game by injury. These days, she’s a coach who’s devoting most of her time to putting Art back on top of the rankings. When the film opens, the two of them are married with a child. This means that much of what follows is composed of flashbacks that flip between the years with the same dizzying speed as the sequences on the court.

The time travel takes place while Art and Patrick are trying to best one another in a match that is part of a Challengers tournament, an event in an outer zone of the pro circuit. Patrick’s career has been on the slide for years, while Art, a seasoned grand-slam champion, has lost his urge to compete. It’s only his wife’s ambitions that are keeping him in the game.

Guadagnino has moved in various directions since making his international reputation with his so-called Desire Trilogy – I Am Love, A Bigger Splash, and Call Me by Your Name – but his preoccupation with eroticism has been a constant. This time, however, he’s trying much too hard. This is a film with so many gimmicks that any hint of sensuality gets lost amid the hustle and bustle.

The flashbacks take us to the early days of the two men’s friendship at college and their first meeting with Tashi, who’s already a tennis star. They’re both in awe of her, and she responds by playing them off against one another until finally deciding on Patrick, a character whose ego is in the same league as her own. Then, when he disappoints her, Art’s well-mannered combination of talent and self-discipline suddenly becomes irresistible, and they start carving out a life together, with Patrick still hovering on the sidelines.

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