this tennis love triangle is full of racquet-twanging steaminess

All right, who’s for mixed doubles? Cinema has brought us love triangles in the world of professional tennis before – perhaps most memorably in George Cukor’s Pat and Mike and Woody Allen’s Match Point. But the sheer racquet-twanging steaminess of Luca Guadagnino’s new entry in the canon makes its forerunners look like games of back-garden swingball.

Challengers must be the most purely pleasurable film of the year so far. Like a great tennis match, it’s a clash of sleekly honed bodies and minds, and the question of who finally comes out on top is irrelevant to the fun of the struggle itself.
Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist star as Patrick Zweig and Art Donaldson, two former doubles partners and best friends who find themselves vying for the affections of Zendaya’s Tashi Duncan, a goddess of the American youth circuit. The two aren’t McEnroe and Borg, but they strike a similar yin-to-yang balance: Patrick is the showboating hothead with the wolflike smile who can’t wait to go pro, while Art is the steady technician, methodically building his career on a sporting scholarship.

As for Tashi, she’s like no one and nothing else around: lissom, pristine, glowingly beautiful, and a ball of lightning on the court. The friends’ slack-jawed reaction to watching her play for the first time looks completely ridiculous, though after noting this down I realised I was pulling much the same face myself.

It opens at the final of a mid-tier challenger tournament, where Patrick and Art face each other for the first time in years, as Tashi looks on from the front row of the crowd. From this narrative baseline, the plot shuttles back and forth through time, whistling into the past then back to the present, sometimes in elegantly arcing drop shots, sometimes eardrum-splitting smashes.

Screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes expects us to keep up, but despite its complexity his structure is intuitive and smooth, and we soon understand that this ostensibly low-stakes clash is in fact the climax of this trio’s professional and amorous lives.