New York Film Festival 2019

[Chris Knipp]

HILA MEDALIA: MOURNING IN LOD (2023)

Eleven years ago I reviewed Dancing in Jaffa, a documentary about a dance class that brought together Arabs and Jews. Here she gets closer to the belly of the beast of Arab-Israeli conflict, following the fates of three families that are inextricably intertwined in a vicious cycle of violence in the city of Lod, Israel, where Israelis and Palestinians live side by side.

Made in partnership with MTV Documentary Films, “Mourning in Lod” revisits a painful chapter from May 2021, during the previous conflict between Israel and Hamas. As the terror group fired rockets into Israel from the Gaza Strip, domestic unrest between Jewish and Arab Israelis erupted in Lod.

In a February, 2024 article, "Film about deadly 2021 Arab-Jewish riots gives insight into post-Oct. 7 life in Israel, "The Times of Israel discusses Israel filmmaker Medalia's skill at getting close to Arabs and Jews alike in areas of tension as illustrated in the current film, and earlier ones.


MTV Documentary Films and Paramount+ will release the film in theaters in NY and LA on April 19 and*it will be available to stream on Paramount+ on May 17.

[Chris Knipp]

WES BALL: KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES(2023)


PETER MACON, OWEN TEAGUE, FREYA ALLAN IN KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES

Defeat of Planet of the Apes

This new entry into the "Planet of the Apes" franchise is intermittently engaging, lively, and full of grand scenes. But it's a misfire. Both the filmmaking and the writing are lacking in that je ne sais quoi that made the originals gripping and hypnotic. Besides which this too-long film takes too much time getting started, and then at the end doesn't really go anywhere.

The whole power of the ape world is lessened for a simple reason: rather uninteresting humans - just one, really - have been allowed to take over. The concept is that over many, many generations - the time line is necessarily vague - dominance has shifted back and forth. Something went wrong. A magic pill, or whatever, that was supposed to make humans smarter made them dumber, literally mute, and apes smarter. The whole idea is a confusion. This was nonetheless the original "Planet of the Apes" concept that goes back to the Pierre Boulle novel and its original 1968 film. But that had Charlton Heston. You didn't necessarily like him, but he was powerful, the essence of charismatic human hubris. Kingdom lacks a big human star.

What actually happens this time is a diminution. A handful of apes link up with a shapely Netflix star from Britain, Freya Allan, known here as Mae. This is an uninteresting, vague character and a mediocre actress. How disappointing when she took over the action and broke into an ill-defined ruined industrial-scientific complex to capture a thingy she brings to another pretty woman to - well, no use trying to explain, but it doesn't do the apes any good, or us.

The notable element here is that Caesar, the perpetual ape dictator-prototype (though played by someone new this time called Kevin Durand, not Andy Serkis anymore) gets a chance to conduct a real Hitlerian grand rally. If only the sequence could have been t night, and lighted and photographed in the style of Leni Riefenstahl, it might have been something. Unfortunately Caesar gets overthrown afterward too easily. It seemed quite implausible that he'd suddenly have no supporters left at all. But the last part of this movie just seems clumsy and confused.

The old "Planet of the Apes" movies, some of them anyway, were magical, so full of drama and giant personalities. Maybe we should just be talking about the new technology. Of course: CGI and performance capture, which no doubt have been improved on even further here. But they were already well developed at least a decade ago with Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. So we would just be talking about little technical tweaks. What counts most is the story, the acting and the dialogue.

Even though a couple of recent ones were good, the heyday of "Planet of the Apes" was the Seventies: 1968, 1970, 1971, and 1971 were the original films when it was all fresh and exciting even if it was a bit spun-out and they were uheven. That was when we cared. Nothing more recent, starting when Tim Burton's 2001 redo came out., has had quite the original frisson. Burton had a notable cast including Mark Wahlberg, Tim Roth, Helena Bonham Carter, Paul Giamatti, Estella Warren and Kris Kristofferson. (Burton's "Planet" do ranked at the bottom though on a Vulture ranking list of all ten films that came out last week.) Matt Reeves' 2014 Dawn of Planet of the Apes, by the way, had the longtime player of Caesar, the grandiose ape leader, Andy Sirkis, along with the charismatic child actor Kodi Smit-McPhee, who was then 18, and Gary Oldman and Ken Russell.

If we talk about money, $90 million to $170 million have been spent on the five twenty-first-century "Planet of the Apes" movies, and a relative pittance on the early ones - even allowing for how much more the dollar was worth back then. But ultimately though in science, fiction making us believe in the created world is all-important, it's not about the money. It's about the story and the human values.

Rupert Wyatt's 2011 Rise of the Planet of the Apes was pretty fine stuff, great cast (though the "human" roles were underused), great story, with lively, risk-taking acting from James Franco. Critics preferred Matt Reeves's 2014 Dawn of Planet of the Apes, which was more grand and grim and had fancier CGI. So it goes: it seems this franchise brings out people's worst taste. But this new entry in the franchise, with its muddled storyline and unnecessary length, still ranks worse with the critics than Rise of.... And they're so right.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Aapes, 145 mins., debuted in many countries May 8, 9, and 10, 2024. Screened for this review May 14 at Hilltop Century, Richmond, CA. Metacritic rating 66%.

[Chris Knipp]

LIU JIAN: ART COLLEGE 1994 艺术学院 (2023)


ZHANG ZIAJUN (DONG ZIJIAN AND RABBIT/DAI ZHIFEI (CHIZI) IN ART COLLEGE 1994

Animation evokes a Nineties Chinese art school populated by slackers

The academic world is notoriously tough material for fiction. That goes as well for art school, as shown by Liu Jian's 2D animation on the subject. As Leslie Felperin truly says in her Biennale Hollywood Reporter review, this film shows "a knack for evoking the rhythms" of "dorm-room debates." But such debates go over material you got tired of a long time ago. Thus Jessica Kiang's Variety review types Art School 1994 as "amiable but overlong." Wendy Ide points out in her Berlin Screen Daily review, the Nineties were a time of "seismic change" in China. This film is a quiet echo of that. Its slacker poses and trying on of radical attitudes could not have happened otherwise. At this point, however, they may be of interest mainly to ciné-sinologists, or western art school grads of a certain age who don't mind reading subtitles of the talky student debates.

Liu JIan is a specialist in animation who previously made Piercing, about the financial crisis (2010) and Have a Nice Day about an attempted theft (2017); I reviewed the latter, finding its appeal, and its action, a bit wan. But appeal there was, and is here, both for visuals and content.

Those three top reviewers from leading trade journals covered the new film and it showed at the Berlinale for reasons, one of which is the involvement of two of China's major directors, Jia Zhangke and Bi Gan, to play voice roles here.

It's the young men, mostly long-haired, often with unlit cigarettes in their mouths, some with little mustaches, who do most of the debating. Working on a painting or sculpture (or piece of conceptual art) isn't much more cinematic than working at a writing desk, but we do see studios. Traditional ones are compared with oil painting ones: they smell cleaner. Gouache painting is disrecommended: it can run if it gets wet. Acrylic is spoken well of: it's permanent. A couple of guys are working on an big painting, and another one slashes it. Whether painting is even valid anymore is considered.

There is an older guy who never got admitted to the school but hangs out at it all the time. He is debunked, but later turns out to become successful - one of several illustrations that actually going to art school isn't what makes you into an artist, any more than writing school makes you into a writer. What it is, is a place to hang out and be cool (or nihilistic). Or it's a way to find a girlfriend or boyfriend (and one girl trashes another for planning on marrying a dull, safe boy - and she runs away). Most importantly, from the art point of view (apart from learning techniques and media and being provided with materials and studios to work in), it's a way to meet people. To this end, some students wind up being dealers or curators, and galleries come looking for emerging talent.

Dorm bull sessions are carried on by these long-haired young men with dead cigarettes in their mouths. Does making money matter? Is traditional art the way to go? They often long for travel to the West. Sometimes they simply wonder if art matters - or is the only thing that speaks to the soul - or if anything matters. They cite Sartre, "Madame Bovary's Lover" [sic], Van Gogh's sunflowers, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and many other mainstays of western culture. There is almost an equal number of young women, several studying singing.

What's special here is the "seismic change" - that China is coming alive and opening up to the West at this moment. It's also a time when getting someone a new Walkman was a big deal and computers and cellphones aren't seen. The internet was just getting ready to explode. People just talk here. These art students are aware of western art and artists but not directly in touch with them. It varies: Zhang Xiaojun (Dong Zijian) is keenly aware of Kurt Cobain, who's just died, his best friend Rabbit/Dai Zhifei (Chizi), less so. The school, as represented in Professor Feng (Wang Hongwei), is not ready to embrace the adoption of anything outside traditional Chinese art.

There are conflicts about pairings in the women's dorm and glimmerings of attractions on both sides, but little happens other than a chaste date. There are breakthroughs of understanding, moments of intellectual (and maybe aesthetic) excitement, doubtless plans made for the future. But nothing decisive happens. This is about being in art school, and Liu has already shown in Have a Nice Day that he isn't much into decisive plot action. It's all about the talk and the atmosphere. Maybe that evokes Éric Rohmer, more likely Richard Linklater, as Felperin suggests, or maybe not. Pleasant but underwhelming.

Art College 1994 艺术学院, 118 mins., debuted Feb. 24, 2023 at Berlin in competition, showing also at Vienna, Sydney, China and Melbourne. Originally screened for this review as part of the Jul. 14-30, 2023 New York Asian Film Festival. Now distributed by Deknalog, it opens Friday, April 26, 2024 at Metrograph-in-Theater and on VOD via Metrograph-at-Home, as part of Liu Jian x 2 alongside the director's Berlinale debut feature animation Have a nice Day.

The entire cast/voice list is as follows:
Rabbit/Dai Zhifei (Chizi), Zhang Ziajun (Dong Zijian), Lin Weiguo (Bai Ke), Xie Caixia (Li Jiajia), Zhao Youcai (Huang Bo), Shou Ma/Ma Yongfu (Renke), Angel (Ziao Yu), Gao Hong (Papi), Hao Lili (Zhou Dongyu), Xiao Mei (Bu Guanjin), Li Baichuan (Xu Zhiyuan), Curator (Peng Lei), Chubster/Luo Hao (Bi Gan), Hu Tianming (Wang Hongwei), The Owner of Tape Store (Shen Lihui), Wu Yingjun (Da Peng), Professor Feng (Wang Hongwei), Afro Hair Chubster (Zeng Hongyu), Afro Hair SKinny (Liu Jian), Section Chief (Zhang Dasheng), Chen Zianyu (Huang Lu), Gu YongQing (Jia Zhangke), Student A (Duan Qi), Student B (Yang Cheng), Student C (Zhang Chenlu), Boss Lady (Fanf Jun), Er Ge (Duan Lian), Guo Sixiang (Kevin Tsai, 'Taiwan, China), A De (Du Haibin), Bar Girl (Hu Wenxin), Zhang Daydong (Zhang Zixian), Young Man A (Xu Lei), Young Man B (Guo Xiaoruo).

[Chris Knipp]

DIEU HAO DO: HAO ARE YOU (2023)

A sprightly documentary exploration of family background does not reinvent the genre but is assured

This documentary about the international squabbles of a Chinese family. The 36-year-old filmmaker Dieu Hao Do, who grew up in Germany, sets out to learn the stories. This family, he explains, has fled two wars, from China to Vietnam, then from Vietnam to Germany. Along the way, seven siblings stopped speaking to each otherm some for many years. All blame communism for the problems.

His mother is in Germany. So is his father and his sister, who was born in Vietnam and is six years older. His father has dementia. He can say questions to him, but his father cannot answer. His mother recounts life in Vietnam under the communists and cries.

There's a side story: his father had another wife and family but left them to be with his mother, who was stigmatized as a home wrecker.

He grew up in Saxony beside two other families from Vietnam, the others ethnic Vietnamese, his from the Chinese minority there. His uncles and aunts live on three continents - not talking. In the film, he goes out to talk to them, one by one.

Number 1, the eldest, is an alcoholic retired businessman living alone in HongKong. He describes the communists in Vietnam in simple, dismissive terms. Most of his time is psent talkngh about his father having a mistress, his early estrangement. Number 2 is in Los Angeles.

From Kino-Zeit: (from the German:)
However, the documentary is only of limited cinematic interest. It is too permeated by an almost pedagogical distance, and here one would have liked to feel the author's passionate voice more strongly. As in the plot of the documentary itself, Do tries so hard to unite all the family poles in such an unbiased way that it is not really clear what he actually wants to tell. At some point you lose track of who is at odds with whom, until the documentary becomes almost luridly private. Although it is impressive to see how vulnerable and sensitive the individual family members still are, how they cannot forgive anything, how they are still driven by their frustration with life, and how clear it becomes what the collective silence has done to everyone, it does seem a little too privatized.
More historical, social context and more information on the social conditions as well as more personal impressions of those affected would have given the documentary a stronger emotional and political core. Unfortunately, one omission is that the alienating migrant experience in Germany does not play a role here, despite the attack on the Vietnamese refugee camps in Rostock in 1992. Especially as Do is unfortunately not a particularly talented narrator in the voice-over, so that the emotional pain, which can be sensed here in some places, is not tangible enough.
Cinematic poetry has Dos

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

[Chris Knipp]

UBERTO PASOLINI: NOWHERE SPECIAL (2020)


DANIEL LAMONT, JAMES NORTON IN NOWHERE SPECIAL

A single father finds out he is soon to die and looks for a family to adopt his little boy

The film is set in Northern Ireland and the father John, sensitively played by James Norton, is a window washer soon to die of an unspecified disease with no family. Social services are providing care for him with 4-year-old Michael (Daniel Lamont) and helping him interview potential adoptive parents. (The whole screenplay was spun out of a notice the filmmaker found in a newspaper.)

The threat of sentimentalism inherent in the premise is off-putting and the idea of using a small boy in such a role feels uncomfortable. Which is silly because the topic is serious and child actors just like playing roles, at best anyway. In the event, Lamont beautifully creates on screen this thoughtful, introspective boy with eloquent eyes. The older actor and the younger show a profound rapport developed offscreen.

The film alternates sessions where John plays with the boy or takes him to and from school and when he seeks prospective adoptive parents. It seems a rather unusual process, his interviewing them, in the company of Shona (Eileen O’Higgins), a young adoption agency trainee, with the boy in tow not knowing what it's about but perhaps gradually guessing.

So we review with John the quickly rejected "smug poshos" (as Cath Clarke's Guardian review calls them); the couple who say they were hoping for a baby; a man who has a rabbit and disses dogs, while Michael has expressed his longing for a puppy. Several couples are "cartoonishly awful" (Clarke) which is "jarring". The right one is obvious, though deciding still seems impossible anyway.

Perhaps the film's greatest success, apart the justly praised quality of not being maudlin (even if steering narrowly close), is the portrait it draws, thanks to the actor and restrained but clear writing, of a working man with a tough childhood and a wild youth behind him who turned into a mensch when his wife abruptly returned to her native Russia after their baby's birth and he committed to raising the boy alone. James Norton plays this, and all the little tests of daily inner farewells to life and the boy he loves and has lovingly raised and the people met with day to day who fall short.

He's not always saintly. When a jerk trashes his window-washing he tells him "I am not your mate" and comes back and throws eggs at the windows.

John draws out the choosing far beyond the limits of the agency's practice and there's pressure to decide. He avoids telling Michael anything, though the boy must absorb some of what's pending. He hears "adopt" and asks what it is, and when told, tells his dad, "I don't want to adopt." Only near the end Michael pulls out the recommended book on death for small children, When Dinosaurs Die. The rapport of the two actors renders this moment both mysterious and satisfying.

This movie has a keen eye for the undesirable person and the worthy one. But in its care to avoid sentimentality, at times it becomes stingy of emotion and incident. Nonetheless it does lead us through some hard thinking about life's most crucial leave-taking and truth-telling moments.

Writer-director Uberto Pasolini, who was born in Rome, is a nephew of the director Luchini Visconti and related to the Pasolini dall'Onda winemaking family rather than Pier Paolo. His two other most recent films also concern dying without family members to help.

Nowhere Special, 95 mins., debuted Sept. 10, 2020 at Venice, showing at many other international festivals in 2020 and 2021. It released in cinemas Jul. 16, 2021 in the UK and Ireland, and in numerous other countries. Its US theatrical release comes Apr. 26, 2024 in New York and Los Angeles. Metacritic rating: 72%.

[Chris Knipp]

STEPHEN ZAILLIAN'S NETFLIX 'RIPLEY'


ANDREW SCOTT IN THE TV SERIES "RIPLEY"

Stephen Zaillian steals Patricia Highsmith's debut Ripley novel

What's off kilter about the new Netflix Highsmith adaptation, "Ripley," which as a longtime fan of the novels I nonetheless could not resist? First and foremost it's the gifted Irish, openly gay star, Andrew Scott, known and loved for his performances as Moriarty in "Sherlock," the naughtily sexy priest in "Fleabag," and the central character in the admired and cherished film of late last year, All of Us Strangers. Adam White, in the Independent, and he's not alone, holds that Scott is "all wrong" for this "otherwise decent Netflix adaptation." "Ripley isn’t at all the disaster it could have been, primarily because its source material is so strong that you’d have to be incredibly dense to screw it up too badly," he says. That is my own basic starting point. He goes on with the warning: "But it’s haunted by the spirit of past adaptations, unable to wrestle free from the shackles of earlier perfection." White also says, in opening, "To describe Tom Ripley as a conman" (i.e. as the Stephen Zaillian Netflix series does) "feels like doing the character a disservice. Patricia Highsmith’s most prolific creation – he appears in five of her novels written over 37 years – is more of a phantom, a lover of shiny things who glides, charmingly if opaquely, through some of the ritziest places on earth." Granted. "He collects identities and riches, while racking up an impressive body count." And then he concludes: "To many he’ll always bear the face of Matt Damon, who played the role in 1999’s glamorous adaptation of Highsmith’s first novel featuring the man, The Talented Mr Ripley. And that, sadly, may be the undoing of Netflix’s new attempt."

The "The Ripliad," Patricia Highsmith's five-novel series, testifies to how popular her deep dive into the sociopathic mind was and is. She takes us and keep us inside the head of a man doing really evil things, murder, theft, fraud, so we become him, and then she lets him get away with it. He never gets caught, and is able to go from anonymous poverty to enjoying wealth and elegant high living. The source material is not only "so strong," as Adam White says, but is a template for a wide variety of versions, as any great character or theme is. Tom Ripley after all is essentially a chameleon.

Thus we can imagine him as Matt Damon, or Alain Delon, or John Malkovich, and now as Andrew Scott. And none of them is "right," if we want an exact copy of Patricia Highsmith's character. Damon is too guilty and insecure and bothered by his gayness (so far from Highsmith's original conception to , in my opinion, allow Minghella's fiilm to be the authoritative version many seem to ant to make it): the "real" Ripley would never feel any of those feelings. Minghella's film is undoubtedly very well done in some ways as a recreation of Highsmith's first Ripley story, but it gets the main character essentially wrong, makes him too soft, and gives him complications he doesn't have. From this character you can't imagine the further books spinning out.

As for Clément's French-language Ripley, Delon is too beautiful and sensuous, but how can we mind that? However, the film commits the unforgivable sin, in Highsmith's eyes, of letting Tom get caught at the end. But the way the film ends, just before that entrapment happens, at an almost orgasmic moment of sensuous pleasure, is wonderful, and this is a peak moment for Delon in his prime. Malkovich, who plays the later Tom in Caviani's Ripley's Game, living a luxurious European life, is a super-confident, snobbish criminal sociopath: the absolute confidence with which the actor enacts his quick, conscious-free murders and cruelties is delicious to watch. No one could do this better. Malkovich's Tom is just a little too hard and evil: the careful Highsmith reader knows that. But Caviani's thriller is a cool portrait of the sociopath as high-level arriviste, unseen anywhere else.

Zaillian's Ripley is "all wrong," the Independent's White says, because Highsmith's Ripley is "an eerily calm social climber" who is"charming and naive" when he's not braining people with heavy objects, Scott plays him as more of "an overt ghoul" who is "oozing sociopathic menace" and looks like a dangerous type in his "leather jacket" and "greased-up hair" and can't be seen as a "high society interloper." White's too polite to mention another thing. Both Scott and Johnny Flynn who plays Dickie Greenleaf, whose identity Ripley steals, are in their forties, Flynn 41 and Scott 47. You wonder how Dickie's shipping magnate father (Kenneth Lonergan) could have thought them Princeton classmates.

But Zaillian's series is meant as a gruesomely real horror movie, an arty, beautiful one, whose grim noir quality is dialed up and slowed down, a quality exemplified by the agonizing and central sequence in the boat. Everyone says dp Robert Elswit's black and white cinematography is another main character in Zaillian's series, playing out the director's love of gray, cloudy days. On the one hand in Italy that may seem not that easy or appropriate, but the "look" evokes Italian film from the great period, especially Antonioni. Zaillian is riffing constantly off drabness and awkwardness - while many of the scenes are natty and grand.

When Zaillian's and Scott's Tom Ripley arrives at Atrani on the Amalfi Coast where Dickie and his sort-of girlfriend Marge (Dakota Fanning) are living, it's the most picturesque and beautiful place, and Dickie's hilltop villa grand and spectacularly situated. But for Ripley it's just a struggle walking "su su su," "up up up," getting out of breath, and staging a very awkward first meeting. He's not in good shape, either, for climbing lots of stairs. What do you remember? The round cupola and grand residence? No, you remember, mainly, Ripley's sweaty climb.

But even Daniel Fienberg, whose review for Hollywood Reporter is one of the new version's most ardent apologies, has to admit that the drawn-out-ness if its key (and most violent) sequences, though being one of its main points of interest, also goes more than a little too far. "I’m not going to claim there aren’t places where Ripley feels indulgently protracted," Fienberg writes. "I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that if you trimmed the shots of staircases and leering sculptures, you’d lose an hour." Fienberg excuses that, and claims that "Zaillian and Elswit," the cinematographer, "make the series so rapturously pretty that my attention never waned." Really? But this is home viewing. How many breaks did he take? Didn't his finger ever linger over the fast-forward key?

If this works, it does so because it's all so strange and yet somehow real. It's a low-key, drawn out horror movie. And it shows how excruciatingly hard it may be to kill people if you're basically an amateur. And many people love it. The interesting thing about "Ripley" is the wide range of reactions, some utterly hating, others adoring, Metacritic with it's okay-but-not-great overall score of 75%, a gentleman C, in between. The Netflix "Ripley" is a weird experience, another facet in the Highsmith game. It's the Highsmith adaptation that comes closest to being a grand and glorious flop (or a very pretentious one -- see Mike Hale's review in the Times that ends "Auteur! Auteur!"), but one thing is sure: it's great series to debate, the chat about - and a touchstone to judge critics by.

This new older Tom Ripley Andrew Scott so adeptly, if for both us and, by his admission, agonizingly, plays is closer to Malkovich's than to Delon's or Damon's. Whether his Tom has the potential of turning into the posh Sybarite with the cool harpsichordist wife and the Palladian villa in Tuscany of Caviani's film is uncertain, but why not?

Scott's Tom "sells things." It's what he does, he tells someone after Dickie is out of the way. (That enables lots of plot detail and escapes from the book's slightly implausible forged will.) You begin to feel as if Zaillian and Scott in fact have stolen Highsmith's story in order to dismantle it and sell it off - to an unsuspecting public. And you wonder what they're going to do with certain elements of it that they have no use for.

Watch the Netfix "Ripley" if you can, or must. But please above all watch Caviani's Ripley's Game, and read Highsmith.

"Ripley," an 8-part Netflix mini-series from the Patricia Highsmith "novels" (chiefly just the first one, The Talented Mr. Ripley, though with a cameo appearance by John Malkovich hinting at subsequent volumes). Premiere April 4, 2024. Metacritic rating: 75%.

[Chris Knipp]

LUCA GUADAGNINIO: CHALLENGERS (2024)


MIKE FAIST, ZENDAYA, JOSH O'CONNOR IN CHALLENGERS

Can't we just be friends?

Fundamentally Challengers qualifies as a sports movie, one centered on the game of tennis and developed in a triangular love and a three-way rivalry ending in a climactic game when everything is decided. But because it's Luca Guadagnino "back in form," it's exciting, different, and a bit of a tough watch. It may work better on the third viewing - unless you're highlyl adept at following and decoding sudden, scrambled flashbacks, because it's made up almost entirely of a network of them. Music is something this director is especially good at and attentive to, as showed very much in HBO's "We Are Who We Are." Here there is a heavy overlay of songs and blasts of loud techno music. The latter stands for two kinds of high energy, of sexual excitement or the thrill off a pro tennis match. For the sake of the movie they may be inseparable: tennis is sex, and being great at tennis is super-sexy. Sometimes the staccato dialogue is almost drowned out by the tunes, just the way sometimes in a tennis match you may not see where the ball went or what kind of shot gained the point.

There are three actors who go through their paces, and they are in championship form in both senses: they are only pretending to be tennis pros, but they are lean and fit enough to be that, and they inhabit their roles seamlessly and intensely. Though also at times with a light touch.

It begins with a big match at the New Rochelle Tennis Club in the present time between Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O'Connor). Art is a multiple grand slam whose career has declined, and this low level tournament is an attempt to relaunch him. Patrick has never done that well but he is hoping to take off from here. Most of the action comes through multiple flashback points, until the closing scene of the match when it's allowed to ride through to its rather strange end. Something decisive, if indefinable, happens in that match. But Challengers doesn't imply that winning or losing one match can dchange everything. Or does it? See what you think.

We encounter Patrick and Art as teenagers, promising tennis players and best friends. They've won an important doubles match together. (The two actors look madly young in this sequence.) The way they run around together is comical and fun, and that mood helps lighten later, more serious moments. Now they are watching Tashi (Zendaya) play, and they're in awe. They seem to want to possess her, though they have no right to.

They're more than doubles partners, boarding school roommates, and best friends. They're joined at the hip; they're like brothers, almost twins - perhaps more than that. For indefinable complex reasons, together they dive for Tashi, flirt with her, try to get her number. She knows who they are and refuses, saying she doesn't want to be "a home wrecker" (though they deny that their relationship is like that). These passages are the freshest in the film and seem where Guadagnino is most at home, with the boyishness and sexual confusion. Do Patrick and Art want Tashi or just want to play like her? Or make out with her together, which is more or less what happens?

Whatever happens thereafter, the answer to the question above is emphatically No. They can be rivals, lovers, enemies, but never friends.

Bear in mind that what follows isn't presented chronologically, but in intense flashes we have to reassemble in our minds. In sequences that follow, just when Tashi is peaking, she has a terrible (unspecified) knee injury. She tries to keep playing but her chance at being top seeded is gone, and she gets involved with, then married to, Art, and gives up playing for coaching him. But she also has an affair with Patrick. She and art have a kid, whose creation and care are barely touched on. Not a total tennis orphan, because there is a grandmother. This isn't about that - or much about anything but music, tennis, and these three people.

In several scenes just prior to the final court battle we find that Patrick no longer even has a working credit card and winds up having to sleep in his car in the New Rochelle Tennis Club parking lot prior to the match. He has never done as well as Art has done working with Tashi and now is unshaven, scruffy, sleepy, and hungry. You won't remember Prince Charles or any kind of English accent whether royal, expat, or Yorkshire. O'Connor's character is a loser but the actor is at the top of his game. He has a kind of greasy sheen here that may be the most memorable character of the three, though as Tashi Zendaya radiates a hard, lean sexiness that cuts like a knife, and as Art, Faist's physicality is commanding. Guadagnino, who excels at the sensual, here triumphantly adds that element to the athletic.

The rapid time shifts and the the loud techno keep you on your toes, and evoke the continually renewed adrenalin rush of a professional tennis match. The overwhelm we may feel parallels lives with big choices dominated by the external force of a competitive sport. The individualism and intensely competitive mood of tennis as a aport - one might say narcissism and killer instinct - are essential here. At the same time, Challengersisn't about tennis so much as about the confused allegiances and rivalries that dominate these tennis-obsessed lives. An early scene where Art and Patrick are finally in a bedroom together with Tashi has an emblematic shot where she sits at the bottom of the bed with them on either side of her. She draws them toward her and kisses them, but then she draws them toward each other to kiss each other. But they can't share her, and Patrick is excluded. Everything gets messay after that, but Guadagnino and his writer Justin Kuritzkesm who also penned his upcoming historical film Queer, pesent the mess neatly, in capsules, like the order of a tennis game. But there is a John McEnroe moment from Patrick here, and we see a record number of rackets thrown and smashed.

Everything about the tennis play in Challengers is fudged a bit, most of all the end of the final match, which goes a tad too slow and uses a smidgen too much slo-mo, though as usual in tennis dramas, the principals must look convincing on the court and in the gear and learned how to serve. As things progress, the tennis becomes more and more turbulent and abstract; at the end the camera appears to be almost attached to the balls. O'Connor and Faist and Zendaya don't have to actually play professional-quality tennis, of course, and the matches are a little twisted and abstract.

At the end, the question is which of the two men will win this final, present-time match. Will it really matter? Tennis isn't great because of who wins. The fun will be putting the pieces of this movie back together. Powerful, wildly energetic material to work with, thanks to the actors, to the director, to the score composers duo Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, and thanks to the dpSayombhu Mukdeeprom.

Challengers, 131 mins., debuted in many countries April 18, 2024 and thereafter. Watched for this review at Century Hilltop April 26. Metacritic rating: 83%.