Tag: Luca Guadagnino

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Film/TV

Challengers

Zendaya is Tashi Duncan, tennis phenom who catches the eye of childhood frenemies.

There’s an old saying in Hollywood: Men like movies where things explode, women like movies where relationships explode. Well, ladies, Challengers is here to bring the boom.

I know this is the 2020s, Hollywood has always been sexist, and things are not nearly as binary as they once seemed. But we can all, as moviegoers, agree that we like to watch beautiful people doing stuff. In the case of Challengers, “stuff” is tennis and sex.

The people involved are all beautiful to a point that challenges the anatomically possible. Take Josh O’Connor, who plays vowel-challenged tennis pro Patrick Zweig. The sizzling 33-year-old has done so many crunches, his six pack abs have evolved into an eight pack. I know this because I counted his quivering abdominal bulges during the extended nude scene with his frenemy Art Donaldson, played by the also-nude Mike Faist. When Patrick corners Art in the sauna to confront and/or make peace before the championship match which serves as Challengers framing device, Art greets him with “Put your dick away.” But this is not that kind of movie.

Art and Patrick have been friends since they were 12 years old, when they were roommates at an elite tennis academy. The doubles partners are so completely obsessed with making it in professional tennis, they ignore the simmering sexual tension between them. But one person who can see it is Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), the hot tennis phenom who catches Patrick’s eye, and also Art’s eye, as she demolishes an opponent on center court. When they approach her at the after-party, she gives an impromptu lesson on the art of the game. One can not truly play tennis at the highest level until one can fully know their opponent’s strengths and weaknesses. “Tennis is a relationship,” she says.

Being Zendaya, she’s naturally irresistible to Art and Patrick, who invite her back to their room without specifying who is expected to do what with whom. Tashi’s got an idea, best summed up as “Let’s you and him fuck.”

After the late night hotel scene devolves into ménage interruptus, Tashi declares that whoever wins the Junior Championship match between Art and Patrick gets her phone number.

When Art and Patrick next meet on the court, it’s not at the U.S. Open, but 13 years later at Phil’s Tire Town Challengers Tournament in New Rochelle, New York. It’s the bottom of the barrel in professional tennis, and that’s where Patrick lives now. More accurately, he lives in his Honda in the parking lot. Art is a major tennis champion on the comeback trail after shoulder surgery. He’s here to pad his win numbers by beating up on some chumps. That was Tashi’s idea. She’s his coach now, after suffering a gruesome, career-ending knee injury in college, as well as his wife and baby mama. Their three-way sexual obsession will come to a climax on the court.

That not-so-subtle pun is inspired by Luca Guadagnino. The Italian director never saw a phallic symbol he didn’t want to wave in your face, including rackets, strategically placed balls, and, in one homoerotic tour de force, churros. He’s banking on Zendaya’s star power to bring his film across the finish line (to mix my sports metaphors), and she’s perfect at playing a terminally competitive obsessive who gets turned off when her lovers don’t want to talk tennis in bed.

Challengers is visually stylish with a throbbing Reznor/Ross score. Its biggest problem is that all three of its main characters are irredeemable jerks, so it’s hard to root for anyone in this love triangle. If Guadagnino’s purpose is to show how a life focused solely on competition is an empty existence, punctuated by hot but ultimately unsatisfying sex, then he wins game, set, and match.

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Call Me By Your Name

Remember when you were a teenager (or, if you are still a teenager, remember yesterday) and the mere sight of your crush made it hard to breathe? When it seemed like you and they were the only two people in the world? When all you had to do to have a good time was sit and stare at each other? That is basically what Call Me by Your Name is about, for better and for worse.

Seventeen-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) has a life many would envy. His parents are archeologists and academics who split their time between teaching in America in the spring and fall and living in a haphazardly restored villa in northern Italy in the summer. His father (Michael Stuhlbarg) supervises underwater archeological digs around the Grottos of Catullus, while his mother (Amira Casar) translates German poetry in the apricot orchard. Elio is a budding concert pianist, and his summertime life is split between practicing his music and lounging around various picaresque lakes with other displaced teenagers. But Elio, being a teenager, describes his idyllic existence as “waiting for the summer to be over.”

Every summer, a grad student stays with the family at the villa for six weeks, using the time to work on their thesis. This year it’s Oliver (Armie Hammer), a linguist who easily passes the father’s test questions about the etymology of the word apricot. Since it’s 1983, Oliver is a fan of Giorgio Moroder and the Psychedelic Furs, an awkward dancer, and a total hunk. Elio has to move to the guest bedroom when Oliver arrives, so at first he’s a little resentful of the newcomer. But that resentment quickly turns to fascination, and more. Being 17, Elio is in the midst of a sexual awakening — in other words, he’s super horny all the time. His dalliance with Marzia (Esther Garrel), a young Parisian girl who, like him, is in town for the summer, is turning hot and heavy. But it’s his attraction to Oliver that is the biggest surprise of his short life.

Fortunately for Elio, it turns out that Oliver is bisexual, too, and he’s noticed his young housemate’s attraction. Their age difference — Oliver is postgraduate while Elio is high school aged — and the fact that he is a guest in his teacher’s house make him very reluctant to act on his attraction, so he spends the first few weeks of his working vacation chasing Italian girls around the village. But as time passes, their mutual attraction overcomes their reason, and the pair start an affair for the ages.

Timothée Chalamet (left) and Armie Hammer star in Luca Guadagnio’s new film, Call Me by Your Name, based on the novel by André Aciman.

Call Me by Your Name is the third film in what director Luca Guadagnino calls his “Desire trilogy.” As exemplified by his previous work, 2015’s A Bigger Splash, the through line seems to be beautiful people hanging out in Italy alternately trying to and not to have sex with each other. Guadagnino is obsessed with the first rush of desire, and the agonizing wait to fulfill it. Call Me by Your Name is a long, slow burn, as Elio and Oliver each contemplate forbidden fruit — which in this case is an apricot, not an apple, and, in one squicky scene late in the picture, not metaphorical at all.

Beyond the sexual, the biggest desire the film will inspire is the desire to visit Italy. Cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom plays with the soft but brilliant Lombardi light to create images that seem like a moving Renaissance painting, or a two-hour travelogue with Italian sexytime interludes. The story was adapted from the novel of the same name by André Aciman, with a screenplay by James Ivory, the 89-year-old producer, director, and writer of Merchant Ivory fame. The production company was responsible for a string of high production value period pieces in the 1980s and 1990s, including A Room With a View, and Howard’s End. Guadagnino has absorbed some of that Merchant Ivory mojo, with its sotto vocce emotions and divine European languor. But he’s also fallen victim to his inspiration’s vices as well. As Elio and Oliver slowly circle each other, the movie walks a fine line between amorous tranquility and a nap in the sunshine. But the raw performance from Best Actor nominee Chalamet and the finely nuanced object of his desire Hammer put Call Me by Your Name next to Brokeback Mountain and Blue Is the Warmest Color on the list of the best queer love stories of the 21st century.

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A Bigger Splash

I think A Bigger Splash could represent a turning point for my career as a critic: It’s the moment when I get to identify, and hopefully lend a name to, an emerging genre.

Hear me out: The last few years have seen a slow trickle of films produced in Europe that, despite their outward differences, share certain structural similarities. A group of people, usually white but always unusually rich and privileged, travel to an exotic destination for fun and relaxation. Fine wines are consumed, and lots of sex is had. But their attempt to outrun their personal demons is short-circuited by an unexpected visitor, and soon paradise comes to seem like an expensive prison. Call them First World Problems (FWP) films. Last year’s Youth, an Italian film starring Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel, sequestered the aging actors in a resort in the Swiss Alps where they are driven to despair and then rediscover the joys of life while looking at a nude Miss Universe. It was one example of the genre, which seems to be driven financially by Italian tourism department tax credits.

Matthias Schoenaerts (left) and Tilda Swinton have first world problems in A Bigger Splash.

Italian director Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash follows the FWP template by sending Tilda Swinton to the Mediterranean island of Pantelleria. Swinton plays Marianne Lane, a Bowie-esque rock star who has retreated to the sunny little island to recover after surgery to remove vocal cord polyps. She’s happily napping in the sunshine with her boyfriend Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts), a filmmaker trying to stay sober after a drug-induced suicide attempt a couple of years ago, when trouble arrives in the person of Harry (Ralph Fiennes) and his daughter Penelope (Dakota Johnson). Harry is a freewheeling rock producer who has only recently acknowledged that Penelope is his daughter. The reason for his Mediterranean sojourn is ostensibly to get to know his progeny, but since his chosen itinerary is a visit with his ex-girlfriend, Marianne, it soon becomes obvious that his real motives are different from his stated mission. Penelope is initially starstruck, but that doesn’t last long as she sees that the glamorous folks her dad keeps company with are just flawed human beings like the rest of us.

Dakota Johnson dons Lolita sunglasses in A Bigger Splash.

When Swinton rolls out of bed, she already has the gravitas to play a rock star trying to do the right thing, so for an added degree of difficulty, she plays Marianne as practically mute. If she speaks, she risks undoing the healing her voice sorely needs, so when she does get worked up enough to speak, her words come out as a feeble croak. Swinton is able to conjure more emotion with simple and subtle pantomime than most actors can manage with a full script. Fiennes gets to play essentially the opposite of his fastidious Gustave from The Grand Budapest Hotel. Unlike Marianne, Harry hasn’t accepted any of the responsibility that’s supposed to come with age, but where he and his ex once had wild partying in common, now he’s trying to keep the party going on his own, and it’s getting a little pathetic. Their slowly building emotional tug of war is the film’s heart and soul.

Just as all four main characters have backed themselves into a corner and things are about to get really interesting, Guadagnino and screenwriter David Kajganich cop out. Instead of resolving the converging tensions, they try to raise the stakes, but succeed only in breaking the spell of fermenting decadence. A Bigger Splash is not a bad film, per se, it just never lives up to the early promise of its crackerjack cast. But since these FWP films are financed by tourism-promoting tax credits, it did succeed in one respect: I really want to go to Italy now.