Challengers (Movie)

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    ‘Challengers’ and That Ending: Our Critics Have Thoughts

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    The tennis movie comes to an abrupt stop midmatch, so we don’t know who won. Does that matter?The relationships in “Challengers” are complicated. Patrick (Josh O’Connor) and Art (Mike Faist) were close pals on the juniors tennis circuit when they met Tashi (Zendaya), a phenom. As the years pass and they become entangled in on-court rivalry and off-court sexual tensions, the film builds to a vicious challenger-circuit match between Art, now a top-ranked pro with a confidence problem, and Patrick, sleeping in his car between tournaments. In the stands is Art’s wife and Patrick’s ex, Tashi, who turned to coaching after an injury cut short her career. The film ends abruptly, the outcome of the match unclear — and that has been the subject of much discussion online. So we asked our critic at large Wesley Morris and our movie critic Alissa Wilkinson to weigh in. Caution: Spoilers ahead.WESLEY MORRIS Alissa, we’re here to discuss the final moments of “Challengers,” and in order to do that, I’m committing a big personal no-no and talking about a movie that people have had only two weeks to see. Sometimes it takes me — a culture professional — a while to catch up, so I’d imagine other folks might appreciate some distance between opening weekend and the instant media chatterboxes start breaking down the dismount. I also understand that’s a very 1988 flavor of film discourse and that a judge would overrule me.So: People are confused about this ending? Or intrigued? Either way, I ask: Which part? The storm of final shots (final camera shots) that boot us out of the theater midmatch? Or the final encounter between Tashi and Patrick, which I refuse to ruin? Or her final glimpse, on match eve, of a sleeping Art?If we’re talking about that shot storm, which goes down in a third-set tiebreaker between Patrick and Art, is it so intriguing that it warrants a conversation? There’s one image of Patrick crouching and another of Art aloft, mid-slam, that I’ll always remember. What follows? Eh. I don’t know who these characters are, who they’re supposed to be, or what they might want, even secretly. So I didn’t care what happens after this match.If anything concerned me, it was the fact that this finale takes place in the middle (or the end, I suppose) of the third point of the tiebreaker, which has at least four or five more points to go. Is caring who wins the match gauche? Is it safe to assume that, based on the number of warnings and penalties the exasperated chair umpire (Darnell Appling) Frisbees out, whatever’s happening in that final scene is the end of the match anyway, because one of these guys is getting ejected? Did I just wind up re-enacting what people are doing with this movie anyway and express genuine intrigue?Josh O’Connor as a down-on-his-luck pro in the film.MGMWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How They Served the Tennis Scenes in ‘Challengers’

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      Painstaking effort went into building the energetic competition moments in Luca Guadagnino’s love-triangle tennis drama. Here’s a closer look at the process.“Let’s not make a tennis film.”That was the director Luca Guadagnino’s unconventional approach to “Challengers,” the hit movie starring Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor as rival tennis aces, locked in a high-stakes love triangle.Guadagnino, the Italian director known for his deft eroticism (“Call Me By Your Name”), didn’t want it to look like tennis usually does, with a static camera positioned behind the player who is serving, or a wide shot of the court. “That kind of televisual stillness — there’s objectivity,” he said, “which is exactly the opposite of what I was going after.”Instead, he wanted the action to mirror the characters’ complicated and sweaty dynamic — for viewers to feel like they were inside the competition, which is as much metaphor as sport. “We were asking ourselves all the time, are we really giving a kinetic experience, an intimate experience, for an audience? And are we translating that into something that can emotionally resonate?” he said in a recent video interview.But when production started, Guadagnino was a neophyte: “I was completely ignorant about tennis,” he said. Perhaps that’s why he was able to envision unique shots, like one that is below the net, or another where the camera is the ball, giving a spinning view as it hurtles across the court.Revved by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s techno score, the visuals are naturalism on overdrive. But even with an assist from special effects, the tennis proved hard to shoot; the 10-minute finale game took eight months to produce. It was, Guadagnino said, “a very, very, very laborious movie.”In separate video interviews, Guadagnino, the Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom and Brad Gilbert, the American tennis pro turned coach and commentator, who served as a consultant on the film, explained how they created the vigorous love-set-match moments.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      With ‘Challengers’ and ‘Saltburn,’ Hollywood Movies Embrace Sex Again

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      Studios obsessively focused on PG-13 franchises and animation in recent years, but movies like “Challengers” and “Saltburn” show eroticism has returned.Zendaya, clad in a skintight dress, gyrates on a dance floor in “Challengers,” a $56 million sports drama that arrived in multiplexes on Friday. “It’s getting hot in here,” the hip-hop soundtrack intones, as she closes her eyes and runs her hands through her hair, lost in fantasy. “So take off all your clothes.”The story continues at a motel, where Zendaya, playing a tennis prodigy, begins a ménage à trois with two guys; it fizzles after they become more interested in each other. The plot moves on — to sultry interplay on the hood of a car, in a dorm room, in the back seat of a car, on the wooden slats of a sauna. There is erotic churro eating.“Sex is back!” shouted an apparently elated man at the conclusion of a prerelease “Challengers” screening in West Hollywood, Calif., this month.Trend spotting in cinema is a hazardous pursuit. Think about how many times the rom-com has been declared dead — and alive — and dead. (No, wait, alive.) But this much can be said with surety: Hollywood is hornier than it has been in years.“It absolutely feels like the pendulum has swung back toward filmmakers exploring adult relationships and sexuality in their projects,” said Amy Pascal, the former chairwoman of Sony Pictures and producing force behind “Challengers.”“I welcome that,” she added.Eroticism was common in studio hits like “Basic Instinct,” starring Sharon Stone, in the 1980s and ’90s.Rialto PicturesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Watch Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor Spar Over Churros in ‘Challengers’

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      The director Luca Guadagnino narrates a tense scene between the two characters.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.Churros have never tasted more bitter than in this scene from “Challengers.”In this sequence, which takes place at Stanford, the character Art (Mike Faist), who is attending the university, reconnects with his dear friend Patrick (Josh O’Connor), who has left education to become a tennis pro. Not present in the scene, yet hanging over it, is Tashi (Zendaya), the woman at the center of their complicated triangle.At this moment, Tashi is dating Patrick, but in this scene, Art is trying to throw a wrench into the relationship. The sequence takes place at the university canteen where the two are chatting over churros. Narrating the sequence, the director Luca Guadagnino said that what is playing out is “a game of rivalry sparkling between these two young boys over Tashi, but at the same time, a jealousy that ignites the relationship also because, probably, these two guys are also jealous of one another.”That tension is played out in the way that Guadagnino shoots the sequence, holding on a long two-shot as the friends discuss Tashi, then cutting when Patrick realizes the game of manipulation that Art is playing.“The main guideline in thinking of this movie and the mise en scène was the classic old Hollywood screwball comedy kind of grammar,” Guadagnino said. “Those great movies were all using, in a beautiful way, the stillness of framing to let the performance breathe in all its ambiguities, in all its unspoken conflicts.”Read the “Challengers” review.Read an interview with the stars of the film.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      ‘Challengers’ Review: Game, Set, Love Matches

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      Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist play friends, lovers and foes on and off the tennis court in Luca Guadagnino’s latest.You can always feel the filmmaker Luca Guadagnino trying to turn you on — he’s a zealous seducer. His movies are sleek divertissements about ravishing people and their often sumptuously rarefied sensibilities and worlds. I tend to like his work, even if it can be overly art-directed and feel too (excuse the verb) curated to stir the soul along with my consumer lust. I am moved when a father tenderly comforts his son in “Call Me by Your Name”; my most vivid memories of “A Bigger Splash” is its striking setting and a dress that Tilda Swinton wears.Guadagnino’s latest, “Challengers,” is about a continually changing love triangle involving two besotted men and a sharp, beautiful woman with killer instincts and personal style. Largely set in the world of professional tennis, it is a fizzy, lightly sexy, enjoyable tease of a movie, and while someone suffers a bad injury and hearts get broken (or at least banged up), for the most part it’s emotionally bloodless. Even so, it’s a welcome break in tone and topic after Guadagnino’s Grand Guignol adventures in “Suspiria,” a take on a Dario Argento horror film, and “Bones and All,” about two pretty cannibals hungrily and moodily adrift.Written by the novelist and playwright Justin Kuritzkes, “Challengers” is fairly straightforward despite its self-consciously tortured narrative timeline. It tracks three tennis prodigies — friends, lovers and foes — across the years through their triumphs and defeats, some shared. When it opens, the troika’s one-time brightest prospect, Tashi (Zendaya), has been retired from playing for a while and is now coaching her husband, Art (Mike Faist), a Grand Slam champ rapidly spiraling downward. In a bid to reset his prospects (he’s a valuable property, for one), he enters a challenger tournament, a kind of minor-league event where lower-ranking professionals compete, including against injured higher-ranking players.That match takes place in New Rochelle, N.Y., an easy drive from Flushing, Queens, and the home of the U.S. Open, which Art has yet to win. It’s while in New Rochelle that he and Tashi dramatically reconnect with Patrick (Josh O’Connor), the errant member of their complicated three-way entanglement. A rich boy who cosplays as poor (well, at least struggling), Patrick met Art when they were children at a tennis academy. By 18, they were tight friends and perhaps something more; the movie coyly leaves just how close to your imagination, even as it fires it up. It’s at that point that they met Tashi, then a fast-rocketing star.Soon after the movie opens in 2019, it jumps to the recent past (“two weeks earlier”) and then starts bouncing around back and forth in time like a ball flying over the net, with the New Rochelle match serving as the story’s frame. (The 2019 date may be a nod to an epic men’s final at Wimbledon that year in which, after nearly five hours, Novak Djokovic beat Roger Federer.) Turning back the clock can be a cheap way to make movies appear more complex than they actually are. Here, though, as the story leaps from past to present — from when Tashi, Art and Patrick were feverishly young to when they were somewhat less young — time begins to blur, underscoring that the passing years haven’t changed much.All three leads in “Challengers” are very appealing, and each brings emotional and psychological nuance to the story, whatever the characters’ current configuration. They’re also just fun to look at, and part of the pleasure of this movie is watching pretty people in states of undress restlessly circling one another, muscles tensed and desiring gazes ricocheting. Guadagnino knows this; he’s in his wheelhouse here, and you can feel his delight in his actors. With the cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, he shows them off beautifully, caressing them in light so that they look lit from within. Even during the fantastically staged and shot — and very sweaty — New Rochelle match, they glow.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Zendaya, Luca Guadagnino, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist on ‘Challengers’

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      Can trash talk be a love language?It is in the world of Luca Guadagnino’s new film “Challengers,” which pits two best-friend tennis players, Patrick (Josh O’Connor) and Art (Mike Faist), against each other in a bid to win the heart of the superstar Tashi Duncan (Zendaya). What begins as innocent teasing becomes more charged once an injury cuts short Tashi’s career: Forced to pivot to coaching, she weds Art and goads him to demolish her former lover Patrick on the court, though both men continue to nurse their own hidden agendas.“I find them all really likable and charming — and terrible also,” Zendaya said with a grin. The complicated adult stakes of “Challengers” offer a new pursuit for this 27-year-old actress, who shot to fame as a teenager on the Disney Channel and is now best known for her Emmy-winning role on HBO’s “Euphoria” and the big-budget movie franchises “Spider-Man” and “Dune.” Though she is aware that “Challengers” will test her box-office draw as a solo star, she didn’t overthink her decision to make the movie, which comes out in theaters on Friday.“I wanted to do it because it’s brilliant,” she said. “It’s not like I sat in my room and had this master board: ‘OK, this is how I’m going to make my big transition for my first lead theatrical role.’”Last week at a Beverly Hills hotel, I met Zendaya, her co-stars O’Connor (“The Crown”) and Faist (“West Side Story”), and Guadagnino for an hour of freewheeling conversation about “Challengers” and the pressure of forging a life and career in the public eye. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.“The triangle is not just two people after one,” Luca Guadagnino, the director of “Challengers,” said, “but the corners touch together all the time.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesThis movie poses a lot of questions about ambition and drive. Zendaya, has your relationship to your own ambition changed over time?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More