Challengers: Bisexual Men And Their Girlfriend
Luca Guaganino loves the human form. He’s obsessed with its curves, its lines, the glistening sweat on its skin, the bruises, the cuts, the scrapes, the broken bones, the pain, and the love. In Suspira he indulged in showing moments of agony when peoples bodies were twisted and broken in ways the human body was never meant to bend. In his newest feature all of that is clearly on display in almost every frame.
Seemingly the it woman of the moment Zendaya always looks like she’s playing dress up, the face she made the night before the big match, the last face she makes before that scene cuts, she looks to me like she’s about to have a stroke. I really can’t put my finger on what has upset me so much about her performances, I find it’s similar to someone like Florence Pugh. Both her and Zendaya are both very talented actresses but have as yet to show me a range beyond stoic, sad, and/or angry.
Many of the projects she’s been involved in have seemed like different variations of a soap opera, Dune being the obvious outlier but you could call that an opera adjacent — see space opera.
Josh O Connor, and his abs, are great here. I honestly haven’t watched much his work outside of The Crown, where he played a young Prince Charles but I will be keeping an eye out for him from now on.
Mike Faist, who many would know from the 2021 version of West Side Story and Pinball:The Man Who Saved the Game, is… Feisty.
Moving on to Guandaninos musical tastes, from the Sufjan Stevens folk-soaked Call Me By Your Name score to Suspirira with it’s hauntingly airy Thom Yorke vocals and strings to now with Challengers, Guandaninos musical motifs can be summed up with one work: diverse. Working with Oscar winners (still feels odd to say that) Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the Challengers score delivers a pounding, driving house/techno in-your-face music that’s vital in placing you directly into the bloodstream of these hormonally-driven, adrenaline and electrolyte-fueled, sex-crazed athletes.
The phrases We Are So Back, as mentioned in the NYT article, and We Used To Be A Country are said mostly in jest. But there is some truth to those meme’d out exclamations of joy and cultural exuberance. Directors like De Palma, Lars von Trier, Paul Verhoeven, and Darren Aronofsky, when considering his work with ballet in Black Swan, would regularly confront audiences with images that were at once titillating and morbily grotesque.
Films like Basic Instinct, Body Double, Wild Things, Crash, Secretary, Cruel Intentions, Body Heat, Fatal Attraction, and others regularly featured scenes of matter-of-factly presented coitus. I want to be crystle clear here; the conditions under which these scenes were filmed were often highly traumatic for either party involved, mostly the woman but sometimes the man as well. Intimacy coordinators are a vital and necessary part of ensuring everyone on set is comfortable with how the scene is filmed and choreographed.
With that being said, there is something being lost when the rough edges are sanded down.
There’s not much older and younger generations can agree on these days, but Gen Z and Boomers are aligned in one area. Their aversion to sex in their media. Boomers hate it because their wives hate them and won’t fuck them, Gen Z hates sex in their media because they’re afraid of it. For good reason, not the least of which are the myriad of STDs that are out there, but then there is of course the very real possibility that an unwanted pregnancy can’t be taken care of in almost any state these days.
Challengers is, from a purely filmmaking standpoint, an example of a film from a director working at the height of his craft. His use of framing and blocking characters in tense but also light moments is masterful. So many of Luca’s films, even his less successful outings like Bones And All, are visually stunning. If nothing else, I will always watch Mr. Guaganino’s works in theaters if only for sumptuous eye porn, pun intended.
