Challengers: Suspiria, but with Tennis Rackets
Luca Guadagnino's latest film pulses with desire, almost tragically so.
I’ve never thought of tennis as a particularly erotic sport, but Challengers has me convinced otherwise. The film is a kinetic mixture of sweat and fuzzy balls punctuated over and over again by the piercing sound of racket on ball: each orb a planet, each hit a shattering apocalypse in miniature.
The latest film from Italian director Luca Guadagnino centers on three tennis players caught up in a gut-wrenching love triangle. Like much of Guadagnino’s work, Challengers is a work of long-standing repression giving way to overflowing desires. Guadagnino does for tennis what he did for dance in Suspiria: under his watchful eye, the camera turns the simple sport into something else entirely, something both beautiful and horrific.
The horror comes in the form of the brutally unspoken nature of everything that transpires: for a film in which the three main characters interact quite a bit, so much of that time is spent dancing around the truths that shape the film and its characters. The beauty, on the other hand, comes from seeing those unspoken truths manifest in other ways, particularly on the tennis court.
Set over the course of a single match between Art and Patrick, the film employs a flashback structure to give meaning to the seemingly simple confrontation. The two are torn apart not just over Tashi, Art’s wife and Patrick’s ex, but their passion for one another, something they’ve never been able to articulate except through tennis. Tashi, meanwhile, has seen her tennis career destroyed by injury and finds herself pulled in many directions at once. Everything will come out on the court.
Guadagnino’s approach to tennis is reminiscent of Scorsese’s approach to boxing in Raging Bull. In both films, sporting matches are both an extension of life and a space separate from it. In this contradiction, each film finds something tragic in characters who struggle to define themselves outside the ring or off the court.
In this way the three central characters of the film are trapped in this single match, doomed to sublimate desire and meaning to the swing of the racket and the drive of the ball. Hell is other tennis players.