I never realized editing was such a 'Challenge' lmbo

Well, friends and enemies, after a press tour that seems to have been going on for about 17 months, Challengers, the latest film from Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino has hit cinemas. If the accounts I follow across social media are a representative slice of the American population (which, surely they are, surely I don’t follow accounts that are gay and/or abnormal), Challengers has probably grossed roughly $2 billion dollars opening weekend alone. The sky is truly the limit for this fun and sexy tennis movie! [It made $25 million worldwide, which isn’t bad!]

As the film opens, in 2019, professional tennis players Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (😍Josh O’Connor🥰) are set to face off in a Challenger tournament finale in “New Rochelle.” For the duration of the film, we bounce back and forth between their match and their decades-long friendship.

In the front row of the match sits Tashi (Zendaya). In 2006, they are all seniors in high school. I also graduated high school in 2006, by the way. Patrick and Art are besties and roommates and whatever else who’ve just won the junior doubles tournament together at the US Open. Patrick is in love with Tashi Duncan, whom we spy dancing to Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” on the dance floor of a party thrown in her honor, the young star of tennis worldwide or whatever. She’s famous! But she hasn’t gone pro. She’s going to go to Stanford, instead; she’s in no rush, she has her whole life ahead of her! (This is called foreshadowing.) Art starts crushing on Tashi, as well, but he is bottom-coded, while Patrick is top-coded; so it’s Patrick who is able to get Tashi back to their room after the party to have a much publicized threesome. The boys kiss in this scene, as I’m sure you’ve heard.

Anyway, Patrick starts dating Tashi, winning her number the next day by beating Art in the junior singles competition. Personally, I believe Tashi wanted Art to win her number (Art is also starting at Stanford in the fall), and she also wanted Patrick to lose the match, so she was trying to light a fire under Art. It didn’t work (bottom-coded) so she ends up dating Patrick.

But in the present, Art is the one married to Tashi! And therein lies the conflict… In the years since college, Tashi has coached Art to superstardom and Patrick has languished in obscurity. Patrick is “a natural” while Art is a diligent worker. Art is sponsored by Uniqlo; Patrick sleeps in his car and yearns for the tournament staffer to offer him her Dunkin’ Donuts breakfast sandwich. At one point, Patrick casually scratches what appear to be track marks on his inner elbow.

It’s the stuff of great pop melodrama, almost Sirkian in its use of cosmically opposing archetypes. The script, with its time-hopping structure and jolting set pieces, is flawed but also the star of the film. It aspires to the romantic epic, and if it doesn’t quite reach nirvana all along the way, it gets damned close by the end. The rapturous finale of the film is one of the great sequences in American cinema of the decade so far.

The film is about sex, more than anything else, and the ways sex and tennis parallel each other; references to Alfred Hitchcock’s psychosexual drama Strangers on a Train, in which tennis also plays a major part, punctuate the film. But I don’t want to talk about what the film is about. There are plenty of other geniuses out on the internet to do that (Fran and Matt and especially Clare).

No, I’m going to talk about what I always love to talk about—editing. Because, let me tell you, Guadagnino does not know how to do that. A great director once said, what you’re bad at is also part of your signature (it was either Martin Scorsese or someone in conversation with Scorsese—I forget); and poor editing is one of the great hallmarks of Guadagnino’s work to date.

Look, Guadagnino has frequently captured lightning in a bottle on set. The images and performances in I Am Love, A Bigger Splash, and Call Me By Your Name are often extraordinary in their beauty and specificity. There is a joie de vivre documented in his films that I have never personally experienced in my own life.

But it is that very exuberance that leads to the bad editing, I think. He is trying to fit in every single moment of life captured on set. Which leads to things like a scene of Tashi and Art seated motionless on a white couch opposite each other, shot from seven angles for some reason (yes, I counted lol). They never move and nothing in the room does! Now, of course, who am I to say that seven angles is too many to try to fit into a 90-second scene. Follow your heart, Luca! But that’s not what I would do.

This happens all across the film. I’m thinking of a Big Moment in which Patrick serves the ball, though I don’t remember which because, unlike many of my friends, I’ve only seen the picture once to date. There are several sort of glorious angles of Patrick wielding a racket—and I have to take an aside to celebrate the literally breathtaking cinematography by frequent Apichatpong Weerasethakul collaborator Sayombhu Mukdeeprom—but by cutting them together with the speed at which they must be cut for the congruity of the narrative, Guadagnino diminishes the impact of each.

What we are talking about is commitment, the commitment to fewer perfectly wrought images that breathe deeply, that add to each other instead of subtract—compound against each other, even. The breathless finale is almost enough to make one forget the flaws that came before. But not quite!!

All told, Luca Guadagnino edits his films the way Patrick Zweig plays tennis. Imprecisely, but full of vigor, often failing to hit the big time, but every once in a while, achieving the sublime.