Luca Guadagnino’s film, CHALLENGERS, is about two games: tennis and a three-sided love triangle that feeds the athletic and the sexual competition.

                  Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) and Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) have been inseparable best friends since tennis school. At a junior tournament, they meet the beautiful and fiercely competitive Tashi Duncan (Zendaya). Tashi becomes for them another competition. When she comes to their hotel room, she senses that the two boys are closer than they want to admit. “I don’t want to be a homewrecker,” she says. The result is a three-way kissing session in which the two boys end up kissing each other. Tashi tells them that she will accept the phone number of the boy who wins the game the next day. Patrick wins the game and Tashi—temporarily. After a nasty fight with Patrick, Tashi loses concentration in a game and injures her knee. Her way of staying in the game she loves is to coach Art, who becomes her husband and the father of her child.

                  Years later, Art is trying to get his Mojo back after an injury. Tashi has entered him in a small tournament in suburban New Rochelle, unaware that Patrick has also signed up for the tournament. Art only stays in the game because it means so much to Tashi, who quietly resents the fact that he isn’t as devoted to the game as she is. She also still has a turbulent occasional fling with Patrick, though she claims to despise him. 

                  All this has the makings of soap opera, but the three leads are so good and have such chemistry together that the eroticism sizzles. Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist sweat a lot, first in a scene in a sauna when Patrick tries both to reconcile with Art, from whom he has been estranged, as well as unnerve him before their big match; and, later, on the court when the camera closes in on their sweaty bodies. Tennis is as erotic in this film as the relationships between the three leads. At the end, we see the two men in a sweaty tennis court embrace as Tashi looks on cheering. She knows that the men need each other as competitors to play their best game and that they need each other as friends. 

                  Zendaya is an amazingly beautiful woman and a superb actress. She capture’s Tashi’s fierce ambition and her disappointment in the men she loves, who cannot match her ambition. There’s a touching scene before the big match when Patrick tells her that whatever happens, he will retire at the end of the season. His worry is that she won’t love him anymore. She embraces him, but the look on her face is one of loss. It is no wonder she has sex with Art in the back seat of his car. The two men couldn’t be better. Fair Mike Faist captures Art’s sweetness and dark-haired Josh O’Connor is the quintessential sexy bad boy.

                  Watching the film, I kept thinking of the writings of Gayle Rubin and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick about the role of the woman in what Sedgwick called homosocial bonds between men. Rubin and Sedgwick wrote about literature in which women have to offer the sex between straight men that they cannot have with each other, however attracted to each other they may be. Tashi plays the men against each other for the sake of the game and because she needs to live tennis through them. 

                  I found CHALLENGERS to be totally absorbing. The only thing that put me off was Guadagnino’s tendency to kill a scene with techno music so loud that the dialogue becomes inaudible.  And it’s the same music every time!      

                  In her first conversation with Art and Patrick, Tashi talks about the match she just played. She says that it wasn’t great except for fifteen seconds of volley between her and her opponent. For Tashi that volley was like love. The final moments of the film give us Patrick and Art, thirteen years later, turning a volley into that sort of love. No wonder they end up in a fierce, joyful embrace!