https://github.com/l4rhdj/org7jnds/discussions/2

For a while, anyway. The film jumps around in time, using a fraught 2016 tennis match between top-of-his-field star Art (Mike Faist) and down-on-his-luck Patrick (Josh O’Connor) as its framing device. This is a podunk tournament in New Rochelle, but the stakes seem awfully high for these two men. Challengers then travels back to the opponents’ younger days to explain why this all means so much. Art and Patrick’s teenage and collegiate years are the movie at its most alluring, a heady cocktail of sex and showmanship and nascent movie-star glow that feels awfully special and rare in this era of wan and featureless pop cinema.

Art and Patrick are childhood friends, having boarded together at a prestigious tennis academy. In the mid-aughts, they are about to graduate and head to college (for Art) or go pro (for Patrick) and are competing as a doubles pair in the juniors competition at the US Open. It’s there that they lay eyes on Tashi (Zendaya), a true phenom prodigy who is on her way to mega stardom. The boys chat her up at a party and do a good enough job of winning her over, despite their goofy fumbling, that she agrees to continue their evening. In a smoky, beer-can-littered hotel room, the trois become a menage.

Or something close to it. Guadanigno stages this seduction scene (in which there is never any doubt that Tashi is in charge) with giddy, homoerotic (or is it panerotic?) verve. Things are loose and playful but also, throbbing beneath the surface, quite serious, too. We are witnessing the crucial pivot point of a friendship; it would probably be better for everyone to stop, to not complicate things in this way. But the rational mind is no longer in the driver’s seat. Tashi is interested in these boys for herself, but she is also prodding at them, egging them on to see what they actually might mean to one another. Is all their competitive bonhomie, that intense school-chum bond, masking a simpler attraction?

https://github.com/l4rhdj/org7jnds/discussions/2

https://github.com/l4rhdj/org7jnds/discussions/3

https://github.com/l4rhdj/org7jnds/discussions/4