'Challengers' is a sexy soap opera about a tennis love triangle

It is my great relief to report that sexy movies are back. After suffering through the most puritanical stretch of American cinema since the Hays Code — thanks in no small part to Hollywood studios trying to curry favor with the censorship boards of oppressive regimes by making blockbusters as chaste and inoffensive as possible — it feels like folks are finally fooling around again on the big screen. From the “furious jumping” of “Poor Things” to the pumped iron of “Love Lies Bleeding,” along with bawdy comedies like “Bottoms,” “Joy Ride” and “Drive-Away Dolls,” it’s a happier, hornier era at the multiplex these days. You can add Luca Guadagnino’s “Challengers” to the list of movies you might not want to go see with your grandmother.

This wickedly entertaining soap opera about a love triangle of tennis pros has been engineered as a vehicle for zeitgeist superstar Zendaya, who also produced the picture alongside former Sony studio head Amy Pascal. It’s one of those cinematic coming out parties where an actress famous for playing teenagers is finally allowed to strut her stuff as an adult, deliberately raising eyebrows with racy material while establishing she’s capable of more than just being a girlfriend to Spider-Man and space messiahs. The time-jumping “Challengers” skips around over 15 years or so, following our three main characters from high school into their early 30s. And if it’s not always easy to believe that Zendaya is whichever age the movie says she’s supposed to be at the moment, she makes you want to, which is more important.

The former Disney kid stars as Tashi Duncan, a tennis prodigy on her way to Stanford who already signed an endorsement deal with Adidas in her teens. (Think one of the Williams sisters if they’d been allowed to go outside.) At a tournament, she catches the eye of “Fire and Ice,” two waggish hotshots and childhood best friends played by Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor. Faist’s Art Donaldson is the sensible one, a percentage player aiming to use his skills to secure a good education. O’Connor’s Patrick Zweig is more gifted, more reckless and an irresistible lout. Unlike the serious young strivers around him, Patrick’s got a devil-may-care attitude that can only come from family money. The three get up to some steamy shenanigans on the first night they meet, with Zendaya’s Tashi teasing the bi-curious boys into competing for her phone number.

But that was all a long time ago. In the present day, Art is a successful professional player in the midst of a career skid. His wife/manager Tashi — who we notice has a nasty-looking scar on her knee — has enrolled him in a low-stakes challenger tournament sponsored by a tire dealership in nowhere New Rochelle, trying to get the poor guy’s confidence back up so he can take one last run at the U.S. Open. But as luck (or the movie gods) might have it, Art has to play against Patrick. The former up-and-comer is now down and out, sleeping in his car and angling for a way back into Tashi’s heart, even if that means crushing her husband on the court.

The hugely energetic picture volleys back and forth through time, showing us the entanglements that got the trio from there to here. It’s structured similarly to a tennis match in which we keep score via the rising and falling fortunes of our main players. This kind of years-spanning story is usually stretched out into a streaming miniseries these days, and it’s easy to imagine checking out somewhere around the fourth or fifth episode. Luckily for us, “Challengers” has been conceived as a movie, so it moves.

As previously seen in his “Call Me by Your Name” and “A Bigger Splash,” Guadagnino is maker of shamelessly sensual cinematic experiences, here reveling in the beauty and athleticism of his actors. Every shot of Zendaya appears explicitly designed to show off that she’s got the longest legs in show business. And if you like slow-motion close-ups of sweaty, muscular men’s thighs, have I got a picture for you. Forget about franchises and worldbuilding, “Challengers” is a return to the simpler, more primal pleasure of watching ridiculously hot people fall for each other on a giant screen.

It’s a treat to see a Hollywood movie this devoted to drinking in the sex appeal of its stars. Zendaya so naturally commands the camera, it couldn’t have been easy finding two dudes capable of holding the screen alongside her. Faist made such a malevolent Riff in Steven Spielberg’s misguided “West Side Story” remake that they had to have someone else sing “Gee, Officer Krupke” because he was too damn scary for the song. So it’s a surprise to see how kind and tender the actor can be as Art, the sort of fellow who’s become okay with the idea that he’s always been his wife’s second choice. (It mostly doesn’t bother him anymore. Mostly.) But the biggest shocker here is O’Connor, who I’m told played Prince Charles on Netflix’s “The Crown” but I can’t imagine how somebody so brashly charming was cast as one of history’s goofiest simps. He’s got the same raggedy allure Elliott Gould had in the 1970s, unkempt and irreverent in ways entirely at odds with our contemporary, corporate-friendly culture. It’s scandalously funny to watch him using Tinder like an Airbnb when he can’t afford a motel. Part of you roots for Patrick even when he’s being completely rotten. This is a star-making performance.

“Challengers” was filmed in Boston during the summer of 2022, which is why you might remember sightings of Zendaya and her boyfriend Tom Holland at Tatte. Cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom flattens out the blankest concrete alleys downtown to pass for the screenplay’s purgatorial New Rochelle. (Eagle-eyed viewers will spot that Tashi and Art are staying at The Ritz-Carlton on Avery Street, and yes, that’s Kenny the doorman playing himself.) The tennis scenes were shot at Wheaton College, where Guadagnino and Mukdeeprom went wild with cockamamie camera tricks and racket-POV shots to make an incredibly boring sport (sorry, fans) visually thrilling. This is a very sexy movie with no actual onscreen fornication. Everything’s foreplay for the tennis matches, so it’s appropriate that they’re filmed in such orgiastic fashion.

The sometimes wobbly pacing is powered along by the best score in ages from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, all throbbing techno beats and dirty sighs that Guadagnino mixes distractingly high during the dialogue scenes, making these nondescript hotel rooms feel like nightclubs. (It’s a welcome return to form for the composers, whose aural wallpaper for recent prestige slop like “Mank” and “Empire of Light” had me quipping to a friend that you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become Thomas Newman.)

“Challengers” may not be anyone’s idea of a great film, but it’s the kind I wish we saw more of: unabashedly lusty even if that means being a bit ridiculous sometimes. One floridly melodramatic encounter between Tashi and Patrick in an alley behind the Ritz is punctuated by squalls of litter and stray newspapers whipping through the air, as if a twister had been stirred up by their roiling passions.

Maybe the biggest relief is that the script never resorts to any labored tennis metaphors about love meaning nothing, etc. (Were this only true for some of the early reviews. Oy.) Screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes is the husband of “Past Lives” writer-director Celine Song. I understand that fiction is fiction and nobody likes an armchair therapist but still, the contrast between the films they’ve made about married women meeting up with their old boyfriends is kind of hilarious.

“Challengers” is now in theaters.