Spheroids and Triangles: "Challengers"

 

When the big new releases of 2024 came out, one that slipped past me was Luca Guadagnino’s tennis film, Challengers. This erotic triangle featuring a sexy young female tennis whiz and the two former best friends who lust after her seemed like an interesting departure from Guadagnino’s 2017 hit, Call Me By Your Name. Not that I was entirely entranced by the coming-of-age same-sex romance that gave us an eyeful of Timothée Chalamet—playing a sensitive young man awakening to his own budding sexual urges—clambering all over the golden-hued torso of Armie Hammer. It all seemed, frankly, a bit lugubrious, but critics and audiences clearly were swooning. 

I was curious to see Challengers because the dynamic among the three leads promised to be intriguing and because I wanted to see how Guadagnino handled female sexuality at his film’s center. Certainly he has put together an attractive cast, with the gorgeous  Zendaya rotating between a charmingly boyish Mike Faist (he was Riff in Spielberg’s take on West Side Story) and an appealingly scruffy Josh O’Connor (with an American accent that far removes him from his role as Prince Charles in The Crown).  The idea is that they all meet on the junior tennis circuit where the two very young men have just won a championship as doubles partners and Tashi  is an extraordinary young player with a scholarship to Stanford.

Then time passes, and Guadagnino gets fancy, jumping between various eras we can distinguish mostly because Tashi’s hair gets shorter and Art’s blond curls disappear. The jumps back and forth in chronology are so abrupt that for me it was never clear when several key plot points occurred. Does, for instance, a key tryst between Tashi and Patrick occur before or after she marries Art and bears his child?  I honestly don’t know. 

I can only tell you that Tashi’s behavior in the film is to me maddeningly unappealing. From the first, she’s using herself as a lure, promising her body to whichever of the two men wins an upcoming tournament. We’re supposed to see her as smart and scrappy, using tennis (as well as tennis players) to get what she wants out of life. Personally, although I couldn’t overlook Zendaya’s definite it-girl quality, I  could find nothing very attractive in her machinations. Does she ever feel a genuine emotional connection with either of the two men she keeps in thrall throughout the film? I suspect not . . . so who are we rooting for?

The film ends, predictably, with Tashi’s two lovers battling it out on center court in the finals of a tennis tournament that will determine their careers but also their romantic lives. I won’t tell you who wins, partly because the filmmaker chooses to go for ambiguity, in the service of a finale that is more symbolic than particularly meaningful. It made me think back to a much early moment in Challengers, wherein a teenage Tashi pays a visit to the room shared by the two brand-new junior champions. Both clearly have the hots for her; both badly want to get physical with this tantalizing young woman. First she makes out with Art, and then with Patrick. Suddenly they’re all three wildly kissing. Then she silently backs out of the tryst, leaving two fellows smooching one another. Which, I suspect, is Guadagnino’s real focus in this film: the mutual attraction/repulsion of two male contenders. I don’t think Guadagnino likes women very much. And this film is his way of using a woman as a catalyst to show us his fascination with male-on-male carnal desire. 

The Play’s the Thing: Arsenic and Old Lace

Once upon a time, hit movies got their start as Broadway plays. This was long true of blockbuster musicals, of course: think of the stage-to-screen metamorphosis of (for example) Oklahoma!, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, and Fiddler on the Roof. (Today, though musical theatre is a much harder sell than it once was, the current box-office success of the screen’s Wicked reminds us how a beloved stage play can translate into a motion picture bonanza.)  But stage comedies without musical underpinnings have also been the source of screen success. Think back to 1936, and the Kaufman and Hart screwball stage hit, You Can’t Take It With You, about a family of lovable eccentrics whose daughter falls in love with the son of a stodgy banker.  Two years later, the play was filmed with an all-star cast led by Jean Arthur, James Stewart, and Lionel Barrymore, winning Oscars for Best Picture and for Frank Capra’s direction.  

The awards racked up by You Can’t Take It With You may have been somewhat unique (it’s rare for light comedies to take home top prizes), but there was a time when many a Broadway comedy enjoyed additional kudos for its screen iteration. Clearly loads of people who lived far from Broadway were eager to see shows they’d only heard about, especially if their favorite Hollywood stars appeared in the movie version. Here’s one example: a little farce called The Solid Gold Cadillac, a big Broadway hit of the 1954-55 season, was filmed in 1956. The little old lady of the stage version—someone who upends the business world with her unexpected financial savvy—became in the film the much-younger, much-cuter Judy Holliday, who won critical praise and a Golden Globe nomination. 

Which leads me to mention that the little-old-lady star of the original stage version of The Solid Gold Cadillac was Josephine Hull, who was almost 80 when she created the role. Though she lost that part to the thirty-something Holliday, she did appear on screen in several classic stage-to-screen transfers, including Harvey (that’s the one with the invisible rabbit) and Arsenic and Old Lace. For the latter, released on screen in 1944, Frank Capra was again involved. This time the laughs came from a macabre set-up involving a Brooklyn theatre critic whose two sweet elderly aunts have a surprising habit of bumping off lonely old men with glasses of elderberry wine, delicately laced with arsenic, strychnine, and cyanide. In the film version, Mortimer Brewster (a newlywed after a lifetime of disparaging marriage) is played by none other than Cary Grant. I’ve enjoyed Grant’s appearances in many film comedies (from Bringing Up Baby to Charade), but this may be his most physical role of all. His job is chiefly to react with astonishment to all the zany, grisly doings occurring around him, and Grant is definitely up to the challenge: watching him drop his jaw, bug out his eyes, and do elaborate double-takes is a masterclass in comedic acting. But there are lots of other talented farceurs involved. Chief among them are Jack Carson as a cop with dramatic ambitions, Edward Everett Horton as the proprietor of a lunatic asylum, Jean Adair as Josephine Hull’s lovably addled sister, and the inimitable Peter Lorre as a surgeon with a serious drinking problem. The stage version had featured Boris Karloff as Mortimer’s disfigured (and very scary) brother. As the biggest name in the cast (as well as the play’s chief investor), Karloff couldn’t leave the play to perform in the film version, so Raymond Massey (in Frankenstein-adjacent Karloff makeup) does the honors.