When I first saw Challengers directed by Luca Guadagino, in the summer of 2024, my life was changed. I have never really had a favorite movie and I find it hard to decorate my Letterboxd with my “favorite” movies, when really most of the time I just like watching movies that make me laugh. However, Challengers was one of the only movies I have ever deemed a “favorite” of mine. One of the many things I loved about the movie was its in-depth and complex writing of human nature, and especially relationships built though sport. And I, like many other people, found the movie incredibly sexy.Â
There is a scene in the movie- that when the trailer was making its rounds in the media, had a lot of people either disgusted or intrigued. Fairly early into the movie there is a three-way kiss between Zendaya (Tashi Duncan), Josh O’Connor (Patrick Zweig), and Mike Faist (Art Donaldson). I heard a lot of comments made about how it was almost gross how horny this movie seemed, that Tom Holland would be upset that Zendaya let two dudes kiss on her, that it was supposed to be a movie about tennis, not sex. Although, after the movie had come out and much of what people were left to comment on had surprisingly little to do with the three-way kiss scene in particular, and more to do with the overall sex appeal of the movie. But what makes it so sexy?
Challengers is still a movie about tennis. However, it’s also about the relationship shared between tennis players-Tashi says so, fairly early into the film:
Tashi Duncan: You don’t know what tennis is.
Patrick Zweig: What is it?
Tashi Duncan: It’s a relationship.
Patrick Zweig: Is that what you and Anna Mueller had today?
Tashi Duncan: It is, actually. For about fifteen seconds there, we were actually playing tennis. And we understood each other completely. So did everyone watching. It’s like we were in love. Or like we didn’t exist. We went somewhere really beautiful together.
Source: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt16426418/quotes/?_ssoLoop=1
Tennis, which is a predominantly white sport, appoints Zendaya, a mixed individual, as the young prodigy of the sport and the powerful object of desire to two well-off white men, who admire her for her ability. The desire of both Art and Patrick is not Tashi alone, it’s what she brings to the table. They both see in Tashi what they can’t find in themselves. For Art: her level of confidence, and for Patrick: her level of commitment and structure. Tashi desires both men as instruments to her true passion, which is her love for the sport.Â
When we watch Tashi, Patrick, and Art all kiss, it shows us their relationships and desires to one another, not just three people lip-locking. Yes, the scene is intimate, it’s sexy, and it’s intense, but not for surface-level reasons. Not because two boys kiss each other, not because Tashi is “girlbossing” her way into dominating the sport; It’s because each person exhibits their desire, and they do so through a lens that lacks gender norms, racial norms and shows us people in their entirety. In short, it refrains from showing us what we think we want to see, or what blockbuster movies think we want to see through heavily gendered sex scenes. An unbiased desire is what is being exhibited to us instead. It becomes not just a scene of people kissing each other, it’s a scene that exhibits human connection, and the sharing of many types of desire. Another very important key to the writing behind this scene is that they don’t have sex. Sex isn’t the center of the human connection we witness. It’s an after thought. Desire is the focus of the scene.
Challengers will always be a uniquely sexy movie to me, and one I will often return to. I have never seen “want” or passion shown in a film in which it is purely a feeling and not selling sex to an audience. I have never seen human connection like it was portrayed in this movie. I have chosen to primarily focus on a singular scene out of the beautiful labyrinth that is Challengers because I urge everyone to experience it for themselves. It may not be your favorite movie like mine, but there is a lot of value in the writing of the film that I think would be interesting to experience regardless. Zendaya herself has urged people to “Watch it again” after viewing the movie once or even twice, in order to understand the true dynamics of each character’s desire, faults, and ultimately their place in their bizarre love triangle.