https://github.com/mj7klg/trg7njk/discussions/2

What makes for a great cinematic kiss? The kind of kiss that enraptures an audience because they can feel it in their very bones. The kind of kiss that brings to mind young love long past or the need for something fresh and illicit. A great cinematic kiss is predicated on chemistry and characterization, framing and pacing, but ultimately its success rests on the answer to a single question: Is this the kind of kiss you want to have?

Relatively early in Challengers, director Luca Guadagnino’s peripatetic drama about tennis pros, there’s a kiss — a series of first kisses, really — shared between leading actors Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Josh O’Connor. It takes place 13 years prior to the film’s main timeline. (A fleeting remark about Hillary Clinton’s former presidential campaign overheard on the radio marks the film’s present-ish day as 2019.) Zendaya plays Tashi Duncan, a fiercely intelligent and unapologetically competitive tennis player, who at 18 years old decided to go to Stanford instead of jumping directly into the pros. She speaks of tennis like a lover whose body she studies with the reverence of a priest. Her gaze is meant to read as clear, her voice and posture undaunted. And yet while Zendaya is front and center in the movie’s marketing material, the film’s most important relationship is between Art Donaldson (Faist) and Patrick Zweig (O’Connor), tennis players who have known each other since they were 12-year-old bunkmates at boarding school. The sexual tension between these young men is so thick that Tashi notes she would feel like a homewrecker responding to one or both of their apparent affections for her. “It’s an open relationship,” Patrick counters with a wolfish grin that cuts through the pressure in the boys’ messy, overheated motel room one night, strewn with cigarette ash and half-filled cans of beer.

Now, that kiss. Tashi sits on the motel bed and motions for them both to join her. In a tangle of frantic limbs they land on either side of her. Patrick has already explained that he taught Art how to jerk off, which, until this moment, has been their only physical sexual encounter. Here, Tashi is in control. She teases them with almost-kisses, effervescent touches. Then she turns to Art. Mouth open, eyes closed; hungry with need. Their kiss is tentative before passion takes over. She turns to Patrick, whose desire for her manifests in even deeper kisses and roving hands. The kiss turns three-way thanks to Tashi’s physical encouragement, until she leans back on the bed and lets Art and Patrick sweatily make out on their own as she smirks behind them. The blocking of this moment makes the constitution of the relationship triangle explicit: Tashi’s elemental force in the middle, shaping the reaction these men also have toward themselves and each other. Zendaya leaves them with hard-ons and a proposition: When Art and Patrick go up against each other tomorrow, whoever wins will get her number.

https://github.com/mj7klg/trg7njk/discussions/2

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https://github.com/mj7klg/trg7njk/discussions/4