"Challengers" let's break the tie.

I recently decided to revisit one of my favorite movies of 2024: Luca Guadagnino's "Challengers," a sports drama starring Zendaya, Josh O'Connor, and Mike Faist that, despite having a fairly intimate nature, ends up being one of the most epic stories I've had the opportunity to see in a long time.

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And while the film is presented to us as a typical story in which we will closely follow a love triangle between two tennis players and the woman of their dreams (which is also narrated in a non-linear chronological way), a deeper inspection of it allows us to glimpse its true themes: love, the pursuit of dreams, lust, and the eternal search for perfection.

In Challengers we will meet Art and Patrick, two young tennis players who seem to have been friends for a lifetime, but who have very different expectations for their future.

Art, on the one hand, feels that it is necessary to go to college, and feels that his professional career as a tennis player can wait a few years. On the other hand, Patrick, just as talented as Art with the racket, can't wait to start playing at a professional level.

The real breaking point in their friendship arises when they meet Tashi, a young tennis player with a very promising future, and who unconsciously decides to put them in competition for her love.

Unfortunately, Tashi's career is abruptly cut short by an accident in the middle of one of her matches, so she must give up her dreams and dedicate herself to training her husband Art, who ended up keeping her heart after Patrick left her.

Although in terms of premise everything may sound quite formulaic, I must admit that I have omitted an absurd amount of details within the relationship of these characters, and I honestly feel that the only organic way to absorb them organically is by watching the movie.

Challengers works for several reasons, not only because it has a pretty solid synopsis and very well-written characters who know how to pull it off, but also because it is an audiovisual gem on many levels that takes advantage of the chaos and tension generated by its protagonists to explode before our eyes as if it were a Japanese anime.

Guadagnino has a particularly fast-paced directing style in Challengers, and even those scenes in which we have nothing more than a couple of characters arguing feel like an extremely aggressive tennis match.

Likewise, this fast-paced style is very well supported by the soundtrack by Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor, who did a great job and it is almost offensive that they are not nominated for this year's Oscars.

Everything is very carefully done in Challengers, the costumes of its characters, their body language and even those moments that could seem like filler on a first viewing.

It is a brave film, full of eroticism, emotion and funny moments.

Score taken from my Letterboxd account.