‘Challengers’ Is Almost the First Great Polyamory Movie

The box office success of “Challengers” — it led the weekend, raking in $15 million — suggests that the sexy and subversive, not to mention a good backhand, can drag people to the movie theaters, away from streaming in their salons. A Gen-Z remix of sports film and romantic comedy, it is less a scandal than the suggestion of one. Its themes — polyamory, open relationships, bisexuality — are a scorching serve away from ubiquity.Directed by Lucas Guadagnino, “Challengers” centers on a tennis prodigy, Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), whose meteoric career is cut short by a shredded knee while she’s roasting lesser talents at Stanford. During her time on the amateur tour, sparks flew with the doubles team of Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor). They go by “Fire and Ice,” and bunked together at boarding school. At the beginning, they want her as well as each other.The trio quickly becomes a duo and a remainder, as Duncan and Donaldson end up marrying, with her doubling as his coach. Titles follow, but the slog to the athletic apex is a joyless one, all twitchy anxiety and soulless hotel suites. Advertisements featuring the couple’s sculptured visages look down on them like the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg in “The Great Gatsby.” They are a power couple, but their power appears to be in making each other miserable.Zweig immediately jumps to the professional ranks, and his path is a desultory one, at the fringes of the tour. He ranks 271st, sleeps in his car, mooches breakfast sandwiches, and arranges dates on Tinder with wealthy women so he has a place to lay his head. His potential is unrealized, but his bruised charm persuades that there is a winding way to Wimbledon. He lingers at the outskirts of Duncan’s marriage, a tempting troublemaker. The movie’s fulcrum is a match between Donaldson and Zweig. It’s a low-level affair, the kind of tournament where the up-and-coming, the down-and-out, and stars who are slumming it converge. Mr. Guadagnino is a talented craftsman: His chronological cuts have topspin, and his choreography of the court is stylish and visceral. The tennis sequences are convincing. A particular inventive sequence features a match viewed from the perspective of the ball. “Challengers,” though, aspires to be more than a “Rudy” for the TikTok set. Mr. Guadagnino expounds that the “ball is the ephemeral, invisible force of desire. I wanted to show desire going back and forth.” The Associated Press reports that women made up 58 percent of ticket buyers, unusual for a sports flick. The movie’s cultural currency will derive from its facility not with a racket, but with the zigs and zags of the zeitgeist. If “Battle of the Sexes” — its subject was the match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs — captures one sexual revolution, “Challengers” feints to another, defined by growing eclecticism of attraction (nearly 30 percent of Gen Z identifies as “queer”) and greater openness to non-monogamous romantic arrangements. The New York Times this month embedded a reporter in a Brooklyn “polycule” that comprises 20 people.“Challengers” volleys with these trends, but avoids the risk of hunting an ace. It relaxes into a conventional love triangle rather than exploring more exotic shapes of desire. That’s too bad, because its moments of sexual ambiguity and half-articulated taboo are its strongest. Zendaya knows this terrain from the teen hit “Euphoria,” and she is more compelling here as a girl figuring out what she wants than as a woman married to a man she does not love.The movie’s transgression lies is in its suggestion of the triplicate. There is singles and doubles tennis, but no “triples” version. In romantic relationships, there are single people and couples, though arrangements can vary. It could be that in both three is an uneasy number, an extra player and a third wheel. “Challengers,” though, is most challenging when it suggests that a novel game is afoot, with fresh rules, new possibilities, and riveting risks.

‘Challengers’ Is Almost the First Great Polyamory Movie

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