In a lot of ways it’s easy to understand why this movie’s success may be limited (love triangle movie by indie auteur and tennis?) and at the same time there are so many indicators that this movie should be one of the hottest films of the year (Zendaya! and love triangle! and tennis!). Luca Guadagnino is responsible for some of the weirdest and most fun in the last decade, A Bigger Splash and Call Me By Your Name, and also some of the most WTF movies, Suspiria (which was tiresome) and Bones and All (which was delicious).
Sexually charged churro scene. How they should’ve switched the two guys’ names?? The three-way kiss that wasn’t planned. All the Lore attached to this movie that was unceremoniously stolen away from us last fall and dropped back into our laps in the spring as a result of the SAG-AFTRA strikes, the “only movie release that I actually cared about,” Wife reflected. The Friend I took to this movie afterwards mostly had variations on “Life in a love triangle seems BANANAS right?” and “Threesomes lol” and the couple next to us who got there early, talked a LOT, and left within ten minutes of the start seems to suggest that there’s a broad swath of the viewing public that just won’t find this lurid, messy, messy business as fun as you or I, but all you needed to hear was Zendaya say, “I’m taking care of my two little White Boys” in the trailer to make sure you really, really had to see it in its full context, right? Zendaya says you actually have to see it twice. (Honestly, the next night after I saw this I went to see the 45th anniversary of Alien but I really should’ve seen Challengers on back to back nights–also, fun fact, the demon we’re housing saw its first Ghibli movie this afternoon! Spirited Away!)
So, I’m going to have just a few notes about structure and then talk about the ending after the jump.
The movie requires a little bit of a warning, which is that it’s going to jump around in time a lot, but really what you should know going into it is that there are three major time periods we’re hopping to: 1) the Beginning, i.e. when Art and Patrick are messy little boys, 2) Post-College, when Tashi stops seeing that one guy and sees the other, and 3) the Present, i.e. The Spider-verse, i.e. the Challenger match. The switching is abso-fucking-lutely necessary and fun and after the first thirty minutes you will enjoy toggling between the three periods because they set up jokes and intrigue and lying and all sorts of shenanigans, but until that point you’re just trying to figure out if Art really looks that much younger at Stanford than he does at the doubles tournament and at that point just tell your stupid brain to shut the fuck up.
Some final thoughts seeing the end. It’s really fun that Patrick while confronting Art in the sauna doesn’t ever tell his friend about Atlanta and what happened there. He just repeats “When we were teenagers” and smiles his little rat-faced smile, and we kind of get a closed loop at the end, but in way that makes it really sweet and not as damaging. It’s also neat that Tashi doesn’t offer Patrick the opposing deal you’re expecting, “If you win tomorrow I’ll be your coach,” and it totally vindicates her conflicted feelings if not her actions afterwards. The fight in the Stanford dorm room where the music starts blasting and Patrick and Tashi snipe each other with the most savage takedowns of any early relationship ever is so amazing, I can still feel my heartbeat pounding when I hear Patrick say “I’m not part of your fan club.”
The erotics of this movie are all about aching, about the sting of loss and the ways in which the tennis-lust-love complex produces and destroys these semi-stable/hemi-doomed set pieces. Way fewer threesomes than I expected, way more tennis.
