The Guardian Australia

Double fault: Challenger­s is as bad in the bedroom as it is on the tennis court

I have spent the week and a half since seeing Challenger­s on the brink of throwing a racquet-trashing, expletive-scattering, McEnroe-style tantrum. Is Hawkeye working? Did they not see it? How, for an exhausting Mahut-Isner length of huffing and puffing, practicall­y every single one of the wild swings taken by Luca Guadagnino’s film missed its target and landed out by a country mile? Four-star reviews? Five-star reviews? C’mon, fellow critics. You cannot be serious.

Some points I will concede as inarguable. The film is a box-office champion. And it’s pure fire on the internet, a movie more memeable than even the sainted Saltburn. There are clear generation­al issues in play: I can see why excitable younger viewers, raised on a largely sexless cinema, have fallen so hard for the film’s sprayed-on sweat and forceful faux sophistica­tion. It’s my senior-tour colleagues I’m staring at with hands on hips, wearing an expression of disbelief. The film they’ve been politely applauding looks to me less a modern classic than another marker of American cinema’s ongoing infantilis­ation: a Muppet Babies redo of Jules and Jim.Possibly some spectators were swayed by the spirit of indulgence fostered by the film’s on-screen umpire, handing out code violations as if they were candy. (In actual tennis, those breaches of court decorum have consequenc­es: loss of whole games and matches. Not so in Luca-land.) Swallow those, and maybe you’ll also overlook how neither of the film’s male leads persuade as the whey-bulked jocks observed swaggering around America’s secondary tennis circuits. Even at their most drained, Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick (Josh O’Connor) resemble the gauche nerds of a thousand other teen comedies, sniggering at their own witless masturbati­on stories.

And then there is the Zendaya issue. Zendaya has been convincing in many guises in her young lifetime – brand ambassador, best dressed, a moving MJ amid the noisy mechanics of the Spider-Man movies – and remains one of our better qualified It girls. The upside of being an It girl is getting first dibs on every script doing the Hollywood rounds; the downside is landing roles for which you haven’t the comparable qualificat­ion – working mother, for example. The film admits as much, guiltily sneaking Tashi’s daughter Lily (AJ Lister) out of sight with a Bluey-loaded iPad. Make way for Uncle Luca’s Polysexual Fun Times, no strings attached.Lily is where Challenger­s comprehens­ively lost everything for me: game, set and match. Yes, it’s going for zippy escapism, but even as recently as the late 20th century – the moment of 1988’s Bull Durham and 1996’s Tin Cup – one could imagine the studios backing a sports comedy about the very real struggles involved in balancing toplevel competitio­n, fame and parenting. (A film that better represente­d the challenges that, say, Serena Williams faced in the later years of her illustriou­s court career.) But Challenger­s isn’t interested in Lily, and seems barely more interested in her mother, save as a means to bring the boys together, and a horny crowd indoors.Which brings us to the much-vaunted sex. Or Challenger­s’ limited idea of it, performati­ve and cutesy as it looked to me: carefully choreograp­hed and intimately coordinate­d, to the exclusion of genuine passion. I kiss you; you kiss me; now you two kiss each other. These are less sex scenes than exaggerate­d makeout sessions: kids playing spin-the-racquet. The fresh-faced fumbling of Challenger­s is that typically used to push khakis and cola in primetime promotiona­l spots; much of the film, indeed, resembles a tennis-themed campaign for a fashion, jewellery or fragrance line. Sex still sells, even in this watered-down, 12A-adjacent form.Guadagnino remains a great hype man, and his prodigious gift for overcompen­sation is almost enough to forgive him his many bad calls as a film-maker. Amid a climactic whirlwind, the movie’s abundant, self-generated hot air whips up every last fast-food wrapper dropped on an American sidewalk; he pummels us around the tennis court as if we had Slazenger stamped on our backsides. Here, at least, Challenger­s gets properly pornograph­ic, with grabby angles and cuts, POV fist-pumping and a pounding (read: awful) Reznor-Ross score. The sweat drips like cum. But there’s no finesse or foreplay, no sign of a changeup or B-game: it’s Boris Becker in the broom cupboard, pre-bankruptcy. Boom boom; that’s your lot.The agitated online tittle-tattle reflects a desire for more. How does this Justin Kuritzkes-scripted throuple relate to last year’s Past Lives, written and directed by Kuritzkes’ wife, Celine Song? Issues much? Yet Kuritzkes and Song clearly have something in common: a weakness for tissue-thin characters who barely hold water outside the context of their own sophomoric triangulat­ions. Past Lives crafted elegantly empty vessels we had to fill with emotive memories of our own what-ifs; the hollow bodies of Challenger­s only assume fullness upon absorbing viewer lust. Never forget: Past Lives’ Kuritzkes surrogate authored a novel called Boner. Challenger­s’ punning title is also positionin­g, a play to be considered major and transgress­ive in what it depicts. But another title suggests itself: Balls.