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Challengers’ threesome denies viewers what they want — and gives them something better
29.04.2024 - 16:21 / polygon.com
[Ed. note: This post goes into detail about Challengers, the arc of Zendaya’s character, and the movie’s sex scenes. Spoilers ahead.]
Challengers’ first foray into people’s minds was threesome-forward. With the post-chorus chants of Rihanna’s “S&M” blaring — “Na-na-na, come on” — the first trailer showed us teenage tennis champion Tashi (Zendaya) inviting two yearning tennis boys onto a hotel-room bed, kissing each of them, letting them kiss her, then leaning back on the mattress, smiling. Sex sells, and Challengers looked like it was setting itself up for Ticketmaster-style surge pricing.
Challengers, ultimately, doesn’t have these three horny sports prodigies seal the deal. That kissing session is about as far as Challengers’ sexual content goes, give or take an awkward hookup. But that hotel sequence is the most important scene of the movie, setting up everything there is to know about Zendaya’s Tashi — which, of course, sets up everything you need to know about the movie.
The night defines the lives of Tashi and the duo she calls her “little white boys,” the rakish Patrick (Josh O’Connor) and the softer Art (Mike Faist). After feeling their eyes attempting to devour her all night at a post-match party, Tashi comes to the hotel room to play with her food. She immediately starts bouncing them — and their enchantment with her — off each other. It’s a manipulation as much as a seduction, as she confirms they’re both into her, gets them to admit they once jacked off together (independently and across the room from each other, they stress), then beckons them to the edge of the bed.
She kisses Art, then Patrick, then pulls them both onto her, letting them kiss up her neck before they all kiss each other. Then she pushes their faces together in front of her, just like she’s playing with dolls. As they passionately kiss, Tashi leans back, admiring her handiwork. Then, after a quiet smirk to herself, she leaves.
It’s precoitus interruptus — all promise, no pelvis. The trailer promoted Challengers as a sex-soaked story, but the actual movie seems almost childish in limiting the threesome action to a short-lived makeout session. Which is the point. These are children play-acting at the adulthood they’ve been primed for. And in a way, they’re right. Everything these characters are and eventually will be is there in that hotel-room encounter, swapped between them just as much as spit.
Throughout it all, Tashi is the guiding force. Tashi gives the movie its thesis, that tennis is best understood as a relationship. Challengers picks this idea up and runs with it, letting the tennis matches fill the hedonistic void, and adopt the kind of visual language a sex scene might. Over and over, director Luca Guadagnino
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