'Challengers', sentimental triangle in the tennis world

Friendship, love, betrayal and... tennis: this is how one could sum up "Challengers", the new film by Luca Guadagnino, which was supposed to open the last Venice Film Festival before the production decided to postpone the public screenings of the film due to the actors' strike, thus skipping the Venetian showcase.
At the centre of the story is a sentimental triangle with Tashi Duncan, a world tennis hopeful, who plays at seducing two tennis players who are friends, Art and Patrick. After a serious knee injury, however, Tashi has to give up the court and remains in the tennis world as the coach of her husband, Art. The latter, a world-class champion and winner of several Slam tournaments, is enrolled by his wife in a simple Challengers, after some unexpected defeats, in order to regain his lost confidence. As fate would have it, however, Patrick, Tashi's ex-boyfriend, is also entered in this tournament.

Two years after the beautiful "Bones and All", a profoundly symbolic film in which cannibalism was transformed into a metaphor for a profound existential malaise, Guadagnino returns behind the camera to portray yet again a particularly delicate period in the lives of the three protagonists. The final challenge of the tournament that sees the two friends/enemies once again pitted against each other is continually interrupted by flashbacks that show us their adolescence and the successive stages that led them to compete once more on the playing field.

Sport thus becomes an explicit metaphor for life and their match the representation of a relationship marked by ups, downs and constant changes over time within their relationship.

Several passages of the screenplay are predictable and there are a few too many exaggerations, both in the narrative structure and in the stylistic choices, but Guadagnino knows his stuff and offers the spectator a veritable audiovisual bombardment with eccentric editing - there are continuous changes between frenetic passages and others that are decidedly more static, even with the use of slow motion - and supported by the pounding electronic soundtrack by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. The formal apparatus thus succeeds in making this ménage à trois in which Guadagnino looks to Bertolucci truly engaging, but at the same time succeeds in making his style increasingly personal and continues to convince, after the excellent results of 'Call Me By Your Name', 'Suspiria' and the aforementioned 'Bones and All'.Credible, moreover, are the three leads Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O'Connor, with the latter increasingly on his way to becoming a true international star: the actor will soon be working with Guadagnino again in "Camere separate", an adaptation of Pier Vittorio Tondelli's novel.

Among the most eagerly awaited titles of the weekend in cinemas is Daniele Luchetti's "Confidenza", starring Elio Germano.The actor plays Pietro, a high school teacher who confides to one of his former students, with whom he has a tormented relationship, an unconfessable secret that from that moment on binds them forever. The love affair between the two ends and their lives are divided. When Pietro meets Nadia, a woman very different from Teresa, the threat of the secret confided to his ex comes back to haunt him. The story is based on the novel of the same name by Domenico Starnone: after 'Lacci' (2020), this is the second time that Luchetti has adapted a book by the Neapolitan writer for the screen. It is undoubtedly a controversial and divisive film, 'Confidenza', a film that alternates profound cues with other more forced and superficial passages. It may fascinate and irritate at the same time, but in any case it is a must-see, capable of interest from beginning to end and enhanced by the intense performance of Elio Germano in the role of the protagonist.