Zendaya’s Throuple Falls and Flourishes in Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Challengers’

Do you like your problems champagne flavored and stylish? Then Luca Guadagnino has a movie for you. But if you want the problems of three little people to amount to more than a hill of beans in this crazy world, you're out of luck.

If anything, “Challengers” is an indication of what audiences are craving. Sure, a lot of us have developed a palate for the flesh of the rich, but we’re also desperate for escapism, and Guadagnino delivers like few can. Stylistic flourishes and sex appeal are both specialties, but treating moviegoers like they can think without overthinking is another.

Sometimes he could stand to do a bit more of it, as his overly long exercise in faux feminism proved. But as the marketing has made very clear, this is a movie where Zendaya is the pivot in a throuple, one among professional tennis athletes no less. Since this is a director who made cannibalism menacingly beautiful with “Bones and All,” “Challengers” feels like a whole new opportunity to chow down.

Boy does Guadagnino almost make the most of it, with a likewise almost perfect lead to do it. None of this would work without Zendaya strutting her way through it like the force of nature she is, the kind of movie star whose immaculate power is beautifully ruffled by gale force winds. As Tashi, she claims she doesn’t want to be the homewrecker for fellow athletes and best friends Patrick (Josh O'Connor) and Art (Mike Faist), but how could it be otherwise once she enters their lives?

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As they all circle and collide with each other, Zendaya effortlessly overshadows her male co-stars to a degree that the movie hardly needs to lean into the tragedy of it all when an injury takes her from athlete to coach for the man she eventually marries. She doesn’t need to play insecure, nor is there any need for undertones, with the homoerotic nature of the bros fully out in the open, even if it’s behind closed doors.

It’s actually quite sexy for a movie which, as many have noted, has no actual sex scenes. And it’s surprising only for a time culture which seems to pride itself on incuriosity to such a degree that a casual glance at even the Wikipedia pages for, say, most Old Hollywood stars reveal multiple marriages and partners at the very least that outright conflicted with the studio publicity machine in its insistence on wholesome family life, and a casual glance at other sources do far more than hint at a very rich, mostly unexplored LGBTQ history. 

Movie stars also tend to embody rather than merely act, and while Zendaya is the selling point of “Challengers” for a number of very good reasons, she’s less believable in the scenes set in the present (or just 2019) as a mother in her 30s, both of which have yet to fall within her realm of experience. As “Challengers” makes its way into its third act, even the nonlinear storytelling, exquisite cinematography - courtesy of frequent Guadagnino collaborator Sayombhu Mukdeeprom - and propulsive score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross can’t prevent the encroaching ennui. Not only does it not amount to much, we already get a sense of how it’s going to end: without too much trouble or consequences to anyone involved. At least until 2020.

Grade: B-