The first time I saw “Challengers” was at my hometown’s AMC — not the nice one in the surprisingly-still-vibrant mall, but the grimy one behind the Menard’s. It sort of feels like “The Stanley Parable” in there, or the parts of a Mod Quad dorm which’ve managed to avoid getting remodeled. For such a big multiplex, it’s always ominously quiet; more often than not, the staff outnumber the patrons.
It was me and a flock of three tweenage girls watching “Challengers” that night. Usually, when you’re a friend group in a theater that empty, it feels like you’ve got the golden ticket — you can talk through the movie with abandon. But they (and I) sat there reverently through all 131 minutes. It was that good.
I overuse this word, but “Challengers” really is a gesamtkunstwerk. It’s a total work of art, all its different media striving together toward one end — it’s Wagnerian.
The cinematography is great, particularly all the different ways to shoot tennis that director of photography Sayombhu Mukdeeprom comes up with (from “Mario Tennis Aces” bird’s-eye views to the insane “POV: you’re the ball” and the less successful “POV: you’re Mike Faist” sequences). Most people don’t watch tennis — it’s essentially a country club sport and objectively less riveting than college football, the NBA, F1, etc. — but Mukdeeprom makes you see tennis the way a rabid fan does.
The score is genius. At one moment, it’s driving techno music. At the next, it’s a haunting piano strain that kind of sounds like “The Turn of the Screw” by Benjamin Britten. Every once in a while, it tosses in a hymn sung by a children’s choir just to keep you on your toes. (Emerald Fennell attempts something similar when she uses “Zadok the Priest” in the “Saltburn” soundtrack because it seems like a very directorly thing to do that emulates what Kubrick does in “A Clockwork Orange” or what Anderson does in “Moonrise Kingdom,” but it doesn’t work. Unlike “Challengers,” “Saltburn” doesn’t earn its dramatic musical flourishes.)
The acting is superb, from the top of the cast list to the bottom. Josh O’Connor’s Patrick Zweig and Mike Faist’s Art Donaldson are insufferable but insufferable with irresistible charm and great chemistry nevertheless. Zendaya is at her best not when she’s making that “Look, internal conflict is happening!” face that every director has made her do since “Euphoria,” but when she’s playing off O’Connor or Faist in flirty conversations and gut-wrenching arguments. Director Luca Guadagnino is also great at filling his worlds with a fun variety of character actors and colorful extras.
I loved “Challengers” enough to see it a second time. Last weekend, the Browning Cinema at the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center offered five showings — which were, as far as I could tell, fairly well-attended despite the competing “Flick on the Field,” Texas A&M game and off-campus disos those nights.
Upon a second viewing, though, I was shocked. I had missed something entirely: “Challengers” is hilarious. When I saw it in the almost empty, completely silent AMC, it read as drama — a high drama, a masterpiece. When I saw it at the Browning and people started giggling, I was initially indignant. “The West has fallen!” I screamed in my head. “Americans have forgotten how to appreciate movies with sex scenes. They’re laughing like bashful little school girls! Don’t they realize that the film is genius? Don’t they realize that the director is Italian?”
But I gave it five minutes and realized they were right. “Challengers” is just as much a sex comedy as it is a romantic drama. In a theater howling with laughter, scenes that I had thought were transcendental became something even better: funny.
There’s a lot of talk about how movies aren’t sexy anymore. There’s also a lot of reactionary work that claims to want to “bring sexy back” (“The Idol” and “Saltburn” come to mind). These projects usually turn out sexually explicit — sure — but hardly sensuous at all. There’s nothing sexy about a movie with an agenda, so the problem remains.
Maybe the solution lies somewhere in movies like “Challengers,” movies that are sexy but not so self-serious about it that they can’t leave room for laughter. Perhaps that’s why “Challengers” and, in a similar vein, Jennifer Lawrence’s “No Hard Feelings” work. (I find the ironic wink-wink-nudge-nudge attitude that pervades everything sexual in Marvel films insufferable, however.)
In the end, I was wrong about Guadagnino’s “Challengers.” It’s a whole hell of a lot more like an Italian opera — e.g., Rossini’s “Le comte Ory,” a genuinely beautiful melodrama that also happens to feature a hilarious threesome scene — than anything by Wagner.
