For a movie about tennis, “Challengers” was anything but from its first look.
Last summer, the trailer for Luca Guadagnino’s scintillating sports drama dropped and immediately piqued our interest – not for Zendaya’s tennis whites, but for her bright pink velour zip-up. More specifically, viewers seized upon the scene in which she’s wearing it: While seated on a bed, she beckons two young men clad in loose shirts and underwear to sidle up next to her. She kisses each boy, before brushing her long, undulating hair back and inviting them to her neck. The uptempo, rollicking cadence of Rihanna’s “S&M” threads through the background.
We all thought we knew what (and who) was about to go down.
In this film, sex happens on the tennis court, through an ever-evolving love triangle.
Studies released earlier this year indicated that a subset of Gen Z has renounced their interest in onscreen sex. And yet, though we’re years past Christian Grey’s nipple clamps and “Game of Thrones” brothels, we’re still more or less inundated with libidinous, hedonistic content, some of which has teetered on the line of exploitative and grossly unethical (I’m looking at you, Sam Levinson).
While some naysayers might chalk up younger peoples’ anti-sex stance in media as correlative to their waning sexual pursuits in real life, it really boils down to a desire for a reflection of more nuanced interactions. Gen Z doesn’t want film and television to undergo a puritanized overhaul, wholly devoid of any sexual content. They just want the spicier segments to be less gratuitous and more emotionally resonant.
Enter “Challengers.”
It doesn’t need to show explicit sex scenes to deliver a refreshingly horny plotline. In this film, sex happens on the tennis court, through an ever-evolving love triangle.
Still, it’s telling that “Challengers” was effectively marketed around a scene we all assumed would be a threesome. It had all the makings of a clip from your most ethically sourced porn site: The narrative! The characters! The dingy hotel room!
Here’s how it all goes down. After the best-friend duo Patrick Zweig and Art Donaldson (Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist) — known as Fire and Ice — win the boys’ junior doubles title at the U.S. Open in 2006, they meet up with emerging tennis prodigy Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) at an afterparty. Dumbstruck with sheer attraction and admiration, the boys invite Tashi to come to their hotel room, where they share a meager supply of beer while the boys regale her stories, including a rehashing of the time Patrick taught Art how to masturbate when they were adolescents.
This conversation leads to further flirting (Art blithely refers to Tashi as being “everyone’s type,” as though it’s a universally known truth) before she invites Patrick and Art to join her on the bed. As the boys began to kiss Tashi, I was certain that they were all going to start clawing each other’s clothes off. But that’s not what happens.
After a few minutes of making out, Tashi pulls away from the center, propping herself on her elbows as the camera gazes down at her from above: A satiated grin breaks across her face as she watches Patrick and Art kiss each other, seemingly in earnest (we’ll touch on “Challengers” generous dollop of homoeroticism later). Then she abruptly ends the tryst, leaving the boys – and the audience — hot, bothered, and saying, “Huh?”
This scene is early into the film’s more than two-hour runtime, informing us that our expectations regarding the sex scenes we thought we were going to get, like the love triangle between the three main characters, might be subverted. It also assures us that, while perhaps not our exact expectation, what’s to come won’t be any less hot.
The thwarted threesome isn’t the only aborted sex scene we see in “Challengers.” Several months after the U.S. Open, while visiting Tashi – now his girlfriend — at Stanford, Patrick meets with Art in the dining hall. Leaning into each other with their faces inches apart, the two chat about Tashi as they tear into rather suggestively shaped churros, with Art even taking a bite of Patrick’s at one point after brushing sugar off his cheek The physicality of the scene is incredibly sexually charged and buzzes with erotic undertones; however, we don’t get relief. They stand up from their chairs and the energy fizzles as their chemistry goes unconsummated.
Mike Faist stars as Art and Josh O’Connor as Patrick in “Challengers” (Niko Tavernise / Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures)Later on, back in Tashi’s dorm room, she and Patrick begin to hook up. Once again, however, the film curtails its intimate content. In between groping and kissing Patrick, Tashi gives him unsolicited tennis tips about his professional tour, sparking a semi-nude kerfuffle. When he informs her that she is his peer, and not his coach, Tashi becomes frustrated, abandoning Patrick in bed to unfurl a yoga mat — she’s got to stretch for an upcoming match, after all. The argument facilitates the end of their (formal) relationship, which is wholly ruptured after Tashi sustains a devastating knee injury at said match. The irony contained here is quite obvious, as we already know from the film’s time jumps that Tashi goes on to marry and coach Art, allowing her to vicariously live through his athletic career.
Out of sight but never out of mind
In “Challengers,” sex is dichotomized into interactions that are as blunt as adult Tashi’s bob and acts that we know occur but don’t actually get to see.
For example, at the 2011 Atlanta Open, Tashi and Patrick have a one-night stand, even though she’s engaged to Art. But rather than show us every slap, thrust and moan, “Challengers” tantalizes us with what precedes those moments — figurative foreplay, if you will.
Patrick, who is playing in the competition, serendipitously happens upon Tashi sitting in a hotel lounge. The camera cuts to them sitting alone at a table, and it couldn’t look more like a cocktail date. Tashi stares at her engagement ring, telling Patrick that “it’s his grandmother’s.” When Art emerges from the elevator not long after, the table is empty, but the shimmering outlines of Tashi and Patrick’s bodies linger in the air. It’s clear where they’ve gone.
When I saw “Challengers” at Manhattan’s SAG-AFTRA Robin Williams Center, someone loudly gasped at this scene, eliciting pealing laughter from the rest of the theater.
Zendaya as Tashi in “Challengers” (Niko Tavernise / Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures)Eight years later, the throuple finds themselves intertwined once more at the New Rochelle Challenger. Despite turning out to be a leading professional player, Art has slipped into his athletic nadir and yearns to retire – much to Tashi’s chagrin.
When they learn that Patrick and Art will square off in the final, Tashi meets with Patrick in secret the night before and asks him to throw the match to Art. They hurl high-voltage insults at each other as a windstorm rages around them, swirling trash into the air. Patrick and Tashi look at each other, their hair whipping across their faces — aglow under soft red light — as everything onscreen begins to slow. Pulsing, electronic music from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ synthy setlist rolls in as Patrick gathers her wrists in his hands and pins her against his car.
From the colors to the music, to the actors’ portrayals, this sequence is undeniably wrought with lust. And yet, we still don’t see it come to fruition onscreen. When Gaudagnino gives us a visual of Tashi and Patrick in the backseat of the car, postcoitus, it’s as though we are seeing them through Art’s eyes: the sexiness doesn’t feel fully realized until all three components of the triangle are integrated.
Sex is all about “game, set, match”
So where does sex happen in “Challengers”? On the court.
Early on, the film sets up the idea of tennis as a relationship, which is how Tashi describes it. At the junior ‘06 Open, Patrick and Art ogle at Tashi from the stands as she competes in a singles match. When she secures a point after a particularly electric rally in which she feels she and her opponent finally play real tennis, she belts out, “Come on!”
Once the trio formally meets later that night, they adjourn from the party to sit by a beach. When Art asks her why she yelled at that moment, Tashi likens the sport to a connection with another person — her second scream near the film’s close cements the relationship between her, Patrick and Art, as does the interplay between the men at the New Rochelle final.
Mike Faist stars as Art and Zendaya as Tashi in “Challengers” (Niko Tavernise / Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures)
The snippets of sweat-slicked action from the challenger match that we see throughout the film culminate near the end, as Patrick, seemingly adhering to his deal with Tashi, purposefully double faults. The camerawork and score once again contribute to the breathless, excited atmosphere, as the music gallops in and out with little notice. Wide lens shots show the former best friends volleying the ball back and forth, as they land each thwack and thud with guttural grunts (dare I say, the same sounds they might make if they were doing it). In several other shots, the viewer takes on the ball’s point of view, whizzing around the court with dizzying rapidity. The crowd’s heads oscillate in collective motion – only Tashi’s remains affixed. The music, the camera movement, the challenger match, and the fluid love triangle all mirror each other seamlessly during this scene.
With “Challengers,” it could be very viably argued that humans were divided into polyamorous thirds.
In a move that stays true to “Challengers” unspoken but omnipotent sensuality, Patrick suddenly places the ball in the neck of the racket: a reference from their youth to Art’s serving tic that also doubles as a way to signal that Patrick has slept with Tashi. Only Art knows its meaning, and it leaves him momentarily stunned. As they head into the break, the men are all tied up again, in every sense of the phrase.
It’s not even a stretch to say that the final rally between Patrick and Art — and indirectly Tashi — amounts to an orgasmic climax. The rally proceeds with mounting intensity — it wasn’t merely the former Division I athlete in me speaking when I say that my chest was palpably aflutter with tight, twisted nerves. At match point, the men surge into the air before physically colliding and falling into a collapsed, smiling hug. From the stands, Tashi crows a primal, “Come on!”
It makes perfect sense that her utterance is cyclical — good tennis is what enlivens all three of them, turning them (and by extension, us) on more than any wild threesome ever could. Patrick and Art’s reunification is a return to their days of playing doubles as teenagers; through a final embrace wrapped in an unspoken telepathy, they’re finally back to playing the sport.
For what it’s worth, “Challengers” doesn’t kiss and tell in this instance. We don’t see who won the final the same way we don’t get to see a fully formed sex scene. Neither of those things matters. The gestation of this decades-long, highly magnetized relationship — rife with erotic tension from all sides — is finally complete.
In Plato’s “Symposium,” Ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes recounts the origins of love, claiming that the God Zeus, in an effort to weaken humans (who, in this account, had numerous limbs and faces) spliced them in two.
“[Each] one longed for its other half, and so they would throw their arms about each other, weaving themselves together, wanting to grow together,” Aristophanes says. With “Challengers,” it could be very viably argued that humans were divided into polyamorous thirds.
As screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes said at the film’s Los Angeles premiere, “What’s true about a love triangle is that every love triangle is, by its nature, queer. Whether you intend to be or not, you’re in an intimate relationship with two other people.”
Like graphic sex in media, and complicated by the drawbacks of dating in a digital world, I assume that a significant demographic of Gen Z would reject the triteness of an “other half” soulmate theory. But as “Challengers” well-received release shows, there’s a widespread receptiveness to new, ever-exhilarating takes on romance. In this story, we need all three points of the triangle, not to show their naked bodies, but to deliver a well-balanced story: The type of sexually substantive and utterly unique movie we’ve been waiting for.
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