"Challengers"

 ☆☆☆☆ 

The poster for Challengers wants you to believe that the star of the movie is Zendaya, the mononymous performer who two years ago was named by Time magazine as one of the most influential people in the world. She sits at the center of Challengers, the absorbing, hyperactive new film by Luca Guadagnino, who made the absorbing, languid Call Me By Your Name in 2017.

"Her Game. Her Rules," one of the posters for Challengers says, making it clear beyond all doubt that this is not in any way a gay movie. And yet, Challengers often feels more boldly gay than even Guadagnino's earlier, dreamily homoerotic movie. Yes, Zendaya's Tashi Duncan sits at the center of a love triangle; yes, she uses her physical appearance to flirt with and ultimately bed two men; and, yes, they are each vying for her attention ... well, ostensibly.

That's when Challengers gets really interesting, not exclusively from a gay point of view, though largely. Here is a film that does not shy from acknowledging the far-reaching sexual interests of its main characters, and that does much, much more than suggest that the two men (Mike Faist, the fair-haired; Josh O'Connor, the dark) who are enamored of Tashi are equally smitten with each other. Maybe more.

The place Challengers starts seems to be simple: Tashi watches these two men in a tennis match. Almost instantly, we're pushed back two weeks, and then another 13 years, to the night these characters all first encountered each other. The screenplay by Justin Kuritzkes volleys back and forth in time like a tennis ball, daring us to keep up with it. (At one critical point, I finally broke down and had to admit I wasn't quite sure when was happening up on screen, though it also no longer seemed to matter.)

Faist's Art Donaldson and O'Connor's Patrick Zweig are best friends. They share everything with each other. They may, the movie implies, have shared even more. But one thing is clear: Each is smitten by the other, and never once does Challengers suggest they shouldn't be. When they meet Tashi, the race to bed her seems more a desire to impress each other.

As they jockey for position, Challengers kept bringing to mind the odd, repressed sexual games that characters in Hitchcock movies played, and it it's worth noting that the only characters we see kiss each other with intensity or get naked around each other are the two men. The story progresses, moving back and forth in time as first Tashi seems on the cusp of stardom, then Patrick and, finally, Art. Each is trying to outdo the other. Life for them is a competition. Winning is everything—but not winning the game, rather winning the approval, favor and love of the other.

Though there are more than a few moments in which Challengers is set in a world of luxury and glamour, neither it nor its characters are interested in material possessions—they want to possess and control each other. Despite its outwardly beautiful imagery (like all Guadagnino films, it's obsessed with sensual depictions of the world), Challengers is infinitely more interesting in exploring the emotional workings of people who know they are always playing a game.

The most fascinating part of the movie turns out to be that we're never quite sure exactly what game is being played. Just when we have it figured out, Challengers offers an ending that hits the ball right back into the place it began, with a deliciously ambiguous final shot that could mean just about anything.

The boldness of the game it's playing is really the point—it is irrelevant who wins, as long as everyone has a great time at the game. Challengers turns out not, despite her presence on the poster, to be about Zendaya and her rules, but about all three of these beautiful, manipulative people and the games they play with each other. Watching them is like watching a modern tennis match: You may get whiplash from turning your neck at the ball's impossible speeds, but you can't take your eye on the damn thing, anyway.

Viewed: May 25, 2024 — AMC Universal 16

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"I Saw the TV Glow"

 ☆☆½ 

Maybe this is what a generation gap looks like? When I Saw the TV Glow ended and I left the theater, I heard a group of people next to me raving about their experience. "It was so creepy!" one of them said. Giggling, another confirmed, "That was the most disturbing movie I've ever seen." Everyone marveling about what they had just witnessed was a teenager.

Whatever it was they saw in the movie, I missed it. There is nothing in this film that qualifies as "most disturbing," unless you haven't seen many movies. I'll give them "creepy," but "so creepy"? Not by a long shot. There are, apparently, also lots of coded references to the trans experience in the movie, or so I read once I got home, desperate to understand the significance of what I just watched. Even the most generous film writer acknowledges that these references must be gleaned, that they require a particular "reading" of the film. All right. I'll give it that. I guess I read it wrong.

While I Saw the TV Glow contains some interesting images and an intriguing setup, the movie moves forward at such a sluggish pace that the best way to describe the experience of watching it is being overcome with an unshakeable sense of ennui. Its characters seem to sleepwalk through the world, and even the things they claim are exciting don't seem to excite them much.

The most important of those is an imaginary TV series called "The Pink Opaque," whose name I guess qualifies as one of those coded references. In the mid-1990s, it plays late on Saturday nights on a TV channel called The Young Adult Network, which is too late for Owen (mostly played by Justice Smith) to watch it. An older girl named Maddy (Bridgette Lundy-Paine) invites him over to her house to secretly watch the show in the basement; to get there, he has to lie to his overprotective mother. That's another one of those references to the queer experience. Ultimately, Maddy records the show and hides videotapes for him to find. They both become obsessed with the show, which is a fan-driven fantasy series—a teen "X Files" crossed with "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

Maddy disappears. Owen is left to wonder what happened, and to try to piece his life together after their shared obsession ends. Then, as suddenly as she vanished, Maddy returns, and tells Owen the story of what happened, and how her fandom has crossed all bounds of normalcy.

Mixed in to I Saw the TV Glow are clips from "The Pink Opaque," and seemingly real-life appearances by some of its strange monsters. The idea, I guess, is that Owen and Maddy have taken their love of the show to extreme levels. They can't distinguish what's on screen from reality. They descend further and further into a shared madness.

There's nothing wrong with the idea of I Saw the TV Glow, or even with its near-catatonic state. Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun has a real talent for creating a mood; whether that mood is one that makes for great storytelling is the question. Yet while I Saw the TV Glow creates a distinctive look, it's a pastiche. There's a lot of Donnie Darko, bits of Heavenly Creatures, touches of Poltergeist and even big swaths of Being There. Many of the ideas and a couple of key moments of body horror are deeply influenced by David Cronenberg, whose Videodrome preceded this film by 40 years. To those of us who aren't teenagers, it all feels like things we've seen done before, and better.

The curious inertness of I Saw the TV Glow extends to its characters. They are all able to talk about their feelings of alienation and otherness, but not define them. They lack any insight, or even curiosity about the world around them. It's not even TV that matters to them—it's that one TV show. Why? How? To what end? The movie doesn't much care. Just when it should be trying to explain its feelings, it heaves a sigh, rolls its eyes and says, "You'll never get me." Maybe that's true.

Coincidentally, I saw I Saw the TV Glow on May 4, which has become the manufactured "holiday" of "Star Wars Day," a day on which obsessive fans celebrate their obsession. Scrolling through social media, I read about grown-ups who are still angry with George Lucas for "changing" the film they loved, as if it has no right; I saw polls asking people what Star Wars characters they'd most like to invite to dinner; I read posts in which people contemplated minor plot points from these films with more zeal than they discuss the election or the geopolitical condition of the world or the climate crisis. Obsessions run deep. They're real. People construct their entire lives around fictional creations.

There is something fascinating about that. There's something that could make a captivating, entertaining and thought-provoking film. Unfortunately, queer-coded or not, I Saw the TV Glow isn't it. 

Viewed May 4, 2024 — AMC Burbank 6

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