In ‘Challengers,’ Zendaya’s got major game

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Is there a greater spectator sport than watching fresh talents – whether athletes or actors – come into their own? The slick, sexy, hugely entertaining tennis romantic triangle Challengers offers the high of three young performers at the top of their games under the guidance of Luca Guadagnino, a director who gives them room to swing in all senses of the word. The movie’s a paean to hard work and hedonism, and if its pleasures are mostly surface – grass, clay, emotional – it’s still been too long since we’ve had an intelligent frolic like this.

Justin Kuritzkes’s ingenious screenplay is structured around a single tennis match in 2019 between top-seeded superstar Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and tournament-circuit bum Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), with flashbacks that slowly fill in a complicated backstory. Each time we return to that central game, our understanding of the players and the stakes has completely changed, so if you want the movie to properly uncork all its surprises, come back to this review after you’ve come home from the theatre. I’d stay away from the film’s trailer, while you’re at it.

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That 2019 match is the endgame in a decade-plus friendship/rivalry/bromance between Art and Patrick, with Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) as the fulcrum around which they pivot. Tashi is many things to both men over the years – goddess, lover, coach, wife – but in the star’s steely performance, she’s her own woman first.

The earliest flashbacks find the guys as scruffy best friends from the tennis academy, not remotely ready for the pros, while Tashi is a teenage court sensation – the next Serena, Steffi, Martina all rolled into one. The sneaker deals are already in place when Art and Patrick woo her away from a post-win party to a boozy evening of hoped-for rival or mutual seduction. What ensues is steamy, surprising and ultimately very funny, and never once do you doubt that Tashi is running the show.

Then an unforeseen event takes her out of a playing career into coaching, and the dynamics among the three shift again. And again, and again, as Art ascends to tournament royalty, Patrick hits the skids, and Tashi lays bets both long-term and short- on each man and her own best interests. “Challengers” is as close to a melodramatic three-way as you can legally get, with all concerned parties simultaneously and interchangeably loving, hating, schtupping, gaslighting, goading and manipulating one another. Think Jules and Jim (1962) with a wicked backhand and a soupçon of homoeroticism. The movie’s true to the world of professional sports in that tennis doesn’t function here as a metaphor for sex – the sex is a metaphor for tennis. Everything is.

Guadagnino is the Italian director of I Am Love (2009), A Bigger Splash (2015) and Call Me by Your Name (2017), all three swooning with a distinctly European sensuality regarding food and sex and life’s rich banquet. He makes tennis a turn-on here, too, abetted by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s nimble cinematography (which needle-drops an homage to a famous courtside shot from Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train at exactly the right moment), Marco Costa’s split-second editing, and a sinuous score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross – one of their best to date. I don’t know what actual tennis players will think of Challengers, and I don’t think we should care, because Guadagnino gives us movie tennis, a thrillingly kinetic contact sport where the volleys sound like cannon fire.

Similarly, Zendaya might strike you as not physically imposing enough to earn Tashi’s college-circuit nickname “the Duncanator,” but the actress dominates the film as she dominates Art’s and Patrick’s lives, with the kind of backhand – on the court and in her compliments – that can bring a grown man to his knees. Faist fully delivers on the promise of his shoulda-been-nominated turn as Riff in the 2021 West Side Story remake: He makes Art an adorable nice guy with a killer streak that appears when you least expect it. O’Connor, best known as the young Prince Charles on two seasons of The Crown, is convincingly American and convincingly a dog, always looking for a way to one-up Art and win over Tashi.

But it’s Zendaya’s show, and while she has proved herself as a Disney kid and a taboo-breaking HBO series lead, as Spider-Man’s girlfriend and a ferocious Fremen warrior who’s still the hero’s girlfriend, Challengers is the first big-screen movie in which she holds down the center with that furiously knitted brow. (She’s one of those actresses who rarely smiles, but when she does, it’s a cataclysm.) The movie’s also satisfyingly in tune with a handful of classic threesome romances, from Design for Living (1933) through Jules and Jim, where it’s clear the woman is a master of 3D chess while the guys are stuck playing Pokémon.

The layers of who wants what for whom, and who’s willing to do what to whom to get what they want, grow positively baroque by the film’s climax, and Challengers ends on a curious note that, in retrospect, seems absolutely right. It’s established as early as that drunken seduction scene that these three players (in every sense) are jazzed by competition – by the buzz of beating each other – but also simply, deliriously in love with one another in motion and in serve. That’s the definition of true romance for them: Winning is everything, but the game is more.

Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.

Three and one-half stars. Rated R. At theatres. Language throughout, some sexual content and graphic nudity. 131 minutes.

Rating guide: Four stars masterpiece, three stars very good, two stars okay, one star poor, no stars waste of time.