A good tennis movie is hard to find. Match Point (2005), Woody Allen’s smoldering drama of elite manners, was beautifully wrought but preferred the sport’s metaphoric richness to its actual gameplay. Wimbledon, the 2004 Kirsten Dunst rom-com, CGI’d the occasional backhand but was too timid to hoist any trophies. If nothing else, Challengers, the new movie by Italian director Luca Guadagnino, avoids the charge of excessive politesse. A sweaty romp of a film, the picture believes in nothing so conventional as relaxation. Characters perspire and collide, aware that each scrape or embrace could be the one that alters a match, in every sense of that word.
This obsession with bodies is nothing new for Guadagnino, a filmmaker who has long projected upon the human form any number of visions. In Call Me by Your Name (2017), the director’s American breakthrough, male shirtlessness was both symbol and emotional cue: a synecdoche for alpine freedom and a call to illicit romance. Suspiria (2018), which placed a witches’ coven in a West Berlin ballet academy, treated audiences to the most physically gruesome scene in recent memory. Supernaturally manipulated from afar, a Soviet performer dances until her every bone has snapped.
