Challengers review: Zendaya's bright, sexy and witty tennis love triangle is a ... trends now
Challengers (15, 131 minutes)
Verdict: Game, set and love match.
The Italian director Luca Guadagnino certainly can't be accused of making boring films. His last, 2022's Bones And All, was about cannibalistic serial killers, one of them played by the heartthrob du jour, Timothée Chalamet.
Guadagnino's latest, Challengers, is about a love triangle, which is one of the most hackneyed of all cinematic subjects, but let's just say he gives it topspin by setting it in the unforgiving world of professional tennis and giving Zendaya, hot-foot from Dune: Part Two, her best and sexiest role yet at the triangle's apex.
The writer is Justin Kuritzkes, whose wife Celine Song bagged a Best Original Screenplay nomination at this year's Academy Awards for her charmer Past Lives. Kuritzkes deserves similar recognition for a slick, smart narrative, which whisks us back and forth in time in the stories of Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), her needy husband Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), and Art's former best friend and doubles partner, the roguish Patrick Zweig (Josh O'Connor), who is also Tashi's ex-boyfriend.
Guadagnino's latest, Challengers, is about a love triangle, which is one of the most hackneyed of all cinematic subjects, but let's just say he gives it topspin by setting it in the unforgiving world of professional tennis
Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), her needy husband Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), and Art's former best friend and doubles partner, the roguish Patrick Zweig (Josh O'Connor), who is also Tashi's ex-boyfriend
(L-R) Mike Faist, Zendaya and Josh O'Connor pose for a portrait to promote 'Challengers' on Friday, April 19, 2024
All three are hugely promising young players, Tashi especially, until her ambitions are wrecked by a knee injury. Instead she turns to coaching, marries Art, and guides him to no fewer than six Grand Slam titles.
Patrick, meanwhile, has slipped to 271 in the world rankings. He's broke and has to sleep in his car on the eve of a low-ranking Challengers Tour event in New Rochelle, New York, unaware that the tournament has an exciting wild-card entry, tennis's poster boy, Art, who is trying to get some easy wins under his belt in readiness for the US Open.
Inevitably, the pair meet in the New Rochelle final, but by now they're estranged and, needless to add, Tashi is the reason why.
That's pretty much the film's one-line synopsis, so it needs lots of acting heft and directorial guile to elevate it from what would otherwise be a jumped-up soap opera.
On the whole, it gets them. The trio of leads are splendid,
