Challengers
“This is a game about winning the points that matter.”
Going into this I was expecting a simple sexual story of hot people playing tennis. In some way that’s what I got, but it was so much more compelling and complex than that. In the wake of Bones and All, Luca Guadagnino uses the main concept of Challengers as a larger metaphor. Where Bones and All used cannibalism to represent homosexuality, he uses tennis to represent the trance of being in an intimate relationship.The Ross and Reznor score here might be my favorite i’ve heard in quite some time. A blend of techno and club music to overlay the chaos of the tennis ball flinging back and fourth really heightens the intensity of the scene. And while speaking of Ross and Reznor, this films formatting and time jumps were sort of reminiscent of that of The Social Network, with multiple story lines jumping back and fourth over a wide span of time periods. With all these time jumps it keeps it clear what’s happening and when and doesn’t confuse the audience when it easily could’ve became a jumbled mess. Zendaya and her character absolutely rule the screen. While her motives are left sort of ambiguous, her personality and demeanor are overstated and you know she’s a no-nonsense force.While I’ve seen people hate on the ending, I think it’s perfect. The parallel between the final scene and the hotel scene is great. The cinematography is also a major high point. The fun camera angles and positions make scenes more fun to watch. I’m mainly talking about the POV shots and tennis ball shots we see towards the end. One mistake I made going in that I warn everyone of is to think deeper about the conversations. Because on the surface most (if not all) of the conversations are strictly about tennis, where in reality the entire point of the movie is the disconnect between characters and their levels of obsession with tennis, but mainly, each other.Finally, the most interesting part for me was the morality of each character being left up in the air. Who each characters true allegiance is to is sort of a mystery by the end and I think that it’s a great up in the air question.
2024: Ranked