In one way, it's apt the film's organising slugfest should very nearly be decided by a time violation, given Guadagnino's tendency to overshoot everything, even the routine exposition setting up who's playing who and where. I suspect this is what people are misreading as Movie Art, but it's really just artfulness: you soon begin to miss the way a Hawks or similar could tell a story like this inside 100 minutes, with brisk wit rather than endless huffing-and-puffing. Il Maestro shoots the tennis in intensified single shots, so there's never any sense of court coverage or back-and-forth, the sudden variations of movement and pace that make watching actual tennis such an absorbing pleasure. His grabbiness reaches a nadir in the POV shots of the finale, complete with pumped fists entering the frame: it looks terribly naff for something being praised to the rafters as angular style, like a Lucozade advert you might have glimpsed in the breaks during Surgical Spirit on ITV in 1992. What back-and-forth there is here is built into screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes's ADD-inducing structure, which opens in 2019, flashes back two weeks, returns to the present, flashes back thirteen years, and proceeds in much the same haphazard way thereafter. It takes a full forty minutes just to get its central threesome in the same room, which in itself suggests something about the way our screenwriters have lost the ability to merge backstory and action with the deft hands of a Boris Becker drop shot. Instead, Challengers incessantly jerks its audience around for 131 minutes: it's Surf Dracula, done as a tennis movie.
If you're a die-hard stan of any of these players - as the younger reviewers seem to be - then you may emerge happier. In the course of 131 minutes, you'll witness two or three carefully choreographed, intimately coordinated makeout scenes; these knowing winks to a sex-starved audience are broadly as sexy as Tim Henman, because Guadagnino is trading in that coyly teasing, kit-on sex most commonly used to sell us on khakis and cola. If you come this way anticipating raw, authentic passion, forget it: the fact Challengers is being framed as some sort of boundary-testing erotic breakthrough strikes me as speaking only to the limited imaginations of most film critics. More regrettably, the Guadagnino "touch", such as it is, just opens up more time to ponder the aspects of writing and casting that make little-to-no sense whatsoever. Maybe I missed a memo along the way - maybe it was among the papers swept away in that whirlwind - but there is surely no way Zendaya, seventeen years young at last count, can reasonably be playing mother to even a small child: she still looks like she hasn't had breakfast yet, let alone a baby. (The movie guiltily admits as much by disappearing the kid after the opening fifteen minutes, the better to proceed with Uncle Luca's Polysexual Fun Times, no strings attached.) The boys, meanwhile, are exactly that: klutzy, sniggering nerds, rather than the whey-fed jocks they would have become on the actual tennis circuit. Not for the first time, a major American studio release points up what happens when you abolish the star system and elevate kids who've barely lived to positions of movie responsibility for which they hardly seem qualified.
Even with its exasperating chicanery and insultingly rote characterisation (unimpeachably sensible head girl, silly-billy boys), Kuritzkes's script might have been pulled into functioning shape by the right personnel, by which I may mean credibly adult humans. As it is, it's just the kind of juvenilia that has to beg for an audience's indulgence: a Superbad-level sex comedy, with bust-ups like high-school tiffs, removed of anything truly amusing and replastered with logos and abysmal EDM meant to counter an inherent lack of propulsion and charge in the material. (The score is credited to Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross: both should have their Goth cards revoked.) Guadagnino, the Boris Johnson of cinema, proceeds with the relentless wiff-waff of any other hype man: Challengers builds to an inconclusive crescendo, offering empty highs but only a tentative result. Clearly, that's been enough for the more excitable first responders, but I can't in all honesty be that thrilled by a movie that so conspicuously bears out a crisis in screenwriting, a crisis in what's left of the star system, and that its maker would be better off throwing in his lot with the blue-chip brands he clearly longs to promote than trying to tell an involving or meaningful story. I wonder whether what's really being reviewed here is our collective memory of a time when the movies would have aced this sort of thing; but now they struggle to get past the first round of basic critical thinking, and go on almost as long as Mahut-Isner.
Challengers is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
I stumbled across this review purely because I was searching for a single review mentioning the POV shots. From there I discovered the guardian article, (oddly categorised in the sport section). I have to say, I have never disagreed with a review to the extent that I feel compelled to write a comment on a blog.
ReplyDeleteCriticism of the score, screenplay structure and lead performances are mostly down to taste and can be overlooked. But everything else is contradictory nonsense. You clearly misunderstand the characterisation completely if you describe Zendaya's character as a "sensible head girl" and complain that the film didn't focus enough on the daughter. You're frustrated that the film is too horny, but not sexy enough, too juvenile and "ADD-inducing", but too dull - have you considered the possibility that you're just getting old?