CHALLENGERS: three people and their desire

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Photo caption: Bill Faist, Zendaya and Josh O’Connor in CHALLENGERS. Courtesy of MGM.

Challengers is an absorbing and entertaining set of character studies, wrapped in a love triangle and set in the world of tennis.  Anything but a conventional sports movie, Challengers is remarkably insightful about what it takes to be successful in any competitive endeavor. Director Luca Guadagnino tells his story of three people over 13 years, flashing back and forth between their encounters in the present and roughly 8, 11, 12 and 13 years before.

When we first meet Tashi (Zendaya), she is a juniors champion about to dominate collegiate tennis and already a celebrity; she is clearly headed for Tiger Woods/Michael Jordan territory, where she will be the headliner whenever she competes and her endorsement revenue will dwarf her winnings.  Tashi is highly intelligent, beautiful, driven and confident, and, as a teen, is already an astute and clear eyed observer of human character.

Patrick (Josh O’Connor) and Art (Bill Faist) are, as most teen boys, much simpler.  They are classmates and besties.  Their tennis is not in Tashi’s stratosphere, but they are good enough to contend for the U.S. juniors doubles championship, and to realistically aspire to pro careers.

As tennis players, Patrick and Art are very equally matched.  But, then there is the matter of testosterone – too much (Patrick) and perhaps not enough (Art). 

Patrick has swagger – sometimes that of a charming rogue and sometimes that of a boor or bully.  There’s a saying in sports that is usually applied to baseball pitchers and football quarterbacks – “He has a million dollar arm and a ten cent head“.  That describes Patrick, who is too undisciplined to keep his temper in check and who has too much misplaced pride to accept coaching.

Art, on the other hand, is so  fundamentally decent that we wonder where his ambition comes from.  (Hint: it’s not from within Art himself.)

That’s what we come to learn about the three characters.  One of the keys to Challengers is when each character figures out the other two.  Tashi takes the measure of Patrick and Art with breathtaking rapidity.  Patrick and Art come to understand the others, but much later and at different times.  When the last light switch is toggled on, there’s an explosion.

Guadagnino’s previous three films (I Am Love, A Bigger Splash, Call Me by My Name) form what we calls his Desire Trilogy, and all three abound in sensual desire.  Challengers could have been titled Desire, in the sense that competitive success pivots on who has the most desire, who wants it more than their peers, who has enough drive to fuel the grueling training and who has the killer instinct in competition.

Guadagnino is known for sensual films, set in beautiful places (a palazzo-like house in Milan, a glorious Mediterranean island and the Northern Italian countryside) and with abundant, tantalizing gourmet food. In contrast, Challengers takes place in hotel and motel rooms, tennis courts and locker rooms and the moment closest to food porn involves churros in a Stanford campus cafe. Guadagnino focuses the sensuality on the tennis scenes and the closeups of his actors as they hunger for victory or for sex.

There’s a constant undercurrent of lust, but calling Challengers primarily a love triangle would be too pat. It’s just such a rich depiction of the strengths and weaknesses of the characters, their respective vulnerability to manipulation and their relative levels of ambition.

Zendaya in CHALLENGERS. Courtesy of MGM.

One key to the story in Challengers is when the characters figure each other out. One takes the measure of the other two immediately; each of the other two finally get the others, but at different times.

Challengers is superbly acted. Zendaya’s performance is a revelation, both in the way she hides Tashi’s thoughts from the guys and in her remarkable physicality. Guadagnino uses closeups and quick cutting to make Faist and O-Connor look like they’re playing high level tennis. Zendaya, ripping the ball in long shots, looks like she is ready for the U.S. Open.

Josh O’Connor – the feckless marriage-age Prince Charles in The Crown and the surly protagonist of La Chimera  (by another Italian filmmaker, Alice Rohrwacher) – finally gets to play a character with joie de vivre, and he’s excellent.

Bill Faist in CHALLENGERS. Courtesy of MGM.

I hadn’t seen Bill Faist (West Side Story) before, and his performance in Challengers is often the most interesting. Affable, malleable and conflict-avoidant, the young Art knows when unrequited love is causing his unhappiness. But then, he’s also unhappy when he seems to have it all, and he doesn’t understand why.

Challengers is a wonderful two-hours-and-eleven minutes movie, but I think that there’s an even better one-hour-and-fifty-five minute movie inside; Guadagnino invests too much time in the final confrontation, drawing it out with plenty of slow-motion and house music. Still, this is one of the best films of 2024.

Movies to See Right Now

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Photo caption: Carol Duarte and Josh O’Connor in LA CHIMERA. Courtesy of Neon.

This week on The Movie Gourmet – Coming up on TV – a great silent actor’s only talkie. Next week – new revies of Challengers and Ennio.

CURRENT MOVIES

WATCH AT HOME

Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie and Ben Foster in a scene from Debra Granik’s LEAVE NO TRACE< playing

The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE:

ON TV

THE BLUE GARDENIA
Anne Baxter, sipping a Polynesian Pearl Diver, with Raymond Burr in THE BLUE GARDENIA.

On May 7 on Turner Classic Movies, The Blue Gardenia presents a 1953 view of date rape, with lecherous Raymond Burr getting Anne Baxter likkered up into a blackout drunk with Polynesian Pearl Divers. There’s a very nice twist on the whodunit: when she wakes up, she doesn’t remember killing him, but he sure is dead. There’s even a cameo performance by Nat King Cole.

Coming up on TV – a great silent actor’s only talkie

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I’ve written before about my admiration for actor Lon Chaney, and recommended his The Unknown, even with its wackadoodle plot, and even though I rarely recommend silent film dramas. Chaney, nicknamed “Man of a Thousand Faces”, was an expert with makeup and is well-known for grotesque roles like Quasimodo and the Phantom of the Opera.  But, for all his reliance on changing appearances, Chaney was NOT a gimmick actor.  He was very naturalistic, a relaxed actor whose screen-acting was very modern.   His course features and his charm combine for a unique magnetism.  I think that he would have been very successful in today’s cinema, and he often looks like he is acting in a more modern movie than are the other actors.

Almost all of Chaney’s career was in the silent film era. because he died right after he made his first talkie, The Unholy Three in 1930. So, The Unholy Three is the only movie where we can hear Chaney’s voice, and Turner Classic Movies is airing it on May 3.

To summarize the plot, a ventriloquist, a little person and a circus strongman walk into a bar….Actually the three leave their jobs in a sideshow to set up as a criminal gang, along with the ventriloquist’s pickpocket girlfriend and his pet gorilla. Yeah, it’s farfetched, but its entertaining. Chaney plays the ventriloquist.

The Unholy Three is a remake of a 1925 silent with the same title, also starring Chaney. The original was the first of eight Chaney movies, including The Unknown, directed by Tod Browning (of Dracula fame and Freaks infamy). The 1930 film was directed by Jack Conway.

So, take my advice, DVR The Unholy Three on May 3, and give yourself a rare dose of the speaking Lon Chaney.

Lon Chaney and Lila Lee in THE UNHOLY THREE.

Movies to See Right Now

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Photo caption: Josh O’Connor in LA CHIMERA. Courtesy of NEON.

This week on The Movie Gourmet – a new review of La Chimera and continuing coverage of both the SFFILM and the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival, both underway now. Here’s my latest festival coverage:

REMEMBRANCE

Eleanor Coppola was the wife of director Francis Ford Coppola and the mother of director Sophia Coppola. Eleanor Coppola herself directed perhaps the best ever documentary film about the making of a movie, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse.

CURRENT MOVIES

WATCH AT HOME

Tom Hardy in LOCKE

The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE:

ON TV

Linda Hunt and Mel Gibson in THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY

On April 29, Turner Classic Movies presents Peter Weir’s 1982 political thriller The Year of Living Dangerously, starring Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver. In the exotic setting of Sukarno’s Indonesia, this film has gripping intrigue, romance and a neo-noir ending.

The stars were each coming off their first major feature, Weaver’s Eyewitness with William Hurt and Gibson with the original Mad Max. The Year of Living Dangerously made them both solid A-list movie stars. Linda Hunt won an Oscar for her gender- and race-crossing performance as the local fixer.

Weir had made the fine Australian films Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Last Wave and Gallipoli. This major MGM release brought him success in his first Hollywood picture and empowered Weir to follow with Witness, Dead Poets Society, The Truman Show and Master and Commander.

Sigourney Weaver and Mel Gibson in THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY

The best of the 2024 SLO Film Fest

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June Squibb and Fred Hechinger appear in THELMA by Josh Margolin. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by David Bolen.

The 2024 SLO Film Fest has opened. I’ve screened over a dozen of the features, and here are four that you shouldn’t miss:

  • Thelma: The closing night film is a hoot, starring 93-year-old June Squibb (Oscar-nominated for Nebraska) in an action picture. Squibb plays a scammed senior who goes on a quest to recover her money from the scammers. Thelma is a lot more than a broad geezer comedy, and the relationship between Thelma and her foundering, Gen X grandson (Fred Hechinger) is very heartfelt. Squibb and Hechinger are both great, and Thelma also features indie favorite Parker Posey and the sweet final performance of Richard Roundtree (Shaft). It’s a surefire audience-pleaser, and I predict that Thelma will become a word-of-mouth hit when released in late June. See it first at the SLO Film Fest.
  • Chasing Chasing Amy: In this irresistible documentary, filmmaker Sav Rodgers tells his own highly personal story of finding sanctuary in a romantic comedy that ultimately spurs a both a filmmaking career and his transition to trans man. Rodgers weaves in parallel tracks, the origin story of the 1997 movie Chasing Amy, and thoughtful discussion of how that film, after 25 years of cultural evolution, has aged. We learn that Kevin Smith modeled the novelty of a straight man and a lesbian as inseparable soulmates after his real life friends; the core of Chasing Amy is a love affair sabotaged by the guy’s insecurities, mirroring Smith’s own less-than-two-year relationship with Joey Lauren Adams, who plays the titular character. Rodgers meets Smith himself, who becomes a mentor, and we get current on-camera interviews with Smith, Adams and other principals. Along the way, Rodgers matures from a gushing fan girl to a grownup who recognizes the personal flaws that complicate other people’s relationships. Chasing Chasing Amy seamlessly braids together the fictional love story in Chasing Amy with the stories of real life relationships, including his own.
  • Tokyo Cowboy: This charming dramedy centers on a Japanese corporate turnaround artist, Hideki (Arata Iura). Confident that he has the secret sauce to recharge any stagnant brand, he’s got a slick pitch deck (with a snapshot from his own childhood), and he’s engaged to the corporate vice-president he reports to. His company is about to liquidate a money-hemorrhaging cattle ranch in Montana, when he parachutes in for a quick fix. His Japanese beef consultant goes hilariously native, and Hideki, a smart guy, immediately sees that his idea for a quick fix was mistaken. Now unsettled and off the grid in an alien culture, Hideki recalibrates his values and his life goals. It’s the first narrative feature for director Marc Marriott, who, with cinematographer Oscar Ignacio Jiménez, creates a Big Sky setting that could reset any of us in need of self-discovery.
  • Riding Giants: Monday, April 29: The movie at the SLO Film Fest’s very first Surf Nite was this 2004 surf doc. Riding Giants focuses on the obsessive search for the best wave by some of the greatest surfers in history. We see “the biggest wave ever ridden” and then a monster that could be bigger.  The movie traces the discovery of the Half Moon Bay surf spot Mavericks.  And more and more, all wonderfully shot. IMO, Riding Giants ranks with Dana Brown’s Step into Liquid as the greatest surf documentary ever. Riding Giants was directed by Stacy Peralta, a surfer, a pioneer of modern skateboarding, and a founder of the Powell Peralta skateboard product company. Peralta, who also directed Dogtown and Z-boys, will attend the screening. Fittingly, Riding Giants screens at the Bay in Morro Bay – only one mile from the surf lanes at Morro Rock.

Here’s the trailer for Chasing Chasing Amy.

Under the radar at the 2024 SFFILM

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Isabelle Huppert and Tsuyoshi Ihara in Élise Girard’s SIDONIE IN JAPAN. Courtesy of SFFILM.

This year’s San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM) opens on Wednesday. SFFILM presents a wide-ranging slate of films from 40 countries. The opening and closing night films, Didi and Thelma, are justifiably generating the buzz. Here are four more under-the-radar recommendations.

  • Sidonie in Japan: The great Isabelle Huppert stars in this French drama as a writer whose life has been shaped by grief. Her first success came from a book about her own traumatic loss; her life was reignited by a supportive husband, whom she has also now lost. A new translation of her first book finds her on a book tour of Japan. Sidonie eventually finds that she can explore the navigation of grief with her translator (Tsuyoshi Ihara), for whom still waters run deep, and the silent beauty of Japan’s gardens and temples, helps too. Add some magical realism, and Sidonie in Japan becomes a satisfying story of surviving painful episodes in life. The personal drama is leavened by fish-out-of-water comic touches as a Frenchwoman is introduced to the oft counterintuitive protocols of Japanese culture.
  • The Practice: This deadpan Argentine comedy is a triumph of absurdism. An Argentine yoga instructor living in Chile (Esteban Bigliardi) faces a set of challenges that most people find a way to overcome, including an ex-wife who doesn’t want him back, a nagging mother, a knee injury, a thieving student. Unfortunately, he is devoid of common sense and his every instinct is a misfire. A romantic opportunity arises, but will he find a way to self-sabotage that, too? Ever droll, this film by writer-director Martín Rejtman is very funny.
  • Mother Couch: In this nightmarish fever dream, Ewan McGregor plays a man trapped in an absurd situation – his obstreperous, estranged mother (Ellen Burstyn) is refusing to leave a couch in a furniture store. His adult siblings (Rhys Ifans, Lara Flynn Boyle), whom he barely knows, are present but not supportive. The oddly singular furniture store is itself a bizarre construction, and this fable of parental emotional abandonment just keeps getting ever more surreal. McGregor’s and Burstyn’s performances are very strong, and the depth of the cast is extraordinary: Taylor Russell, F. Murray Abraham and Lake Bell. Mother Couch is the first narrative feature for writer-director Niclas Larsson, an acclaimed director of car commercials, and it’s a remarkable calling card.
  • Banel and Adama: In this well-crafted and beautifully shot Senegalese drama, a 19-year-old couple live in a remote village, happily in love with each other, but chafing at cultural traditions. Banel suffers her nightmare of a mother-in-law, and Adama resists the burdens of community leadership that he knows he isn’t ready for. Can they find happiness in their village? Will they leave together? Their personal stories are set in a dramatic, drought-stricken landscape with houses buried in sand and dust.

Peruse the program and buy tickets at SFFILM. All my SFFILM coverage, including eventual full reviews, will be linked on my SFFILM 2024 page.

A scene from Martin Rejtman’s THE PRACTICE. Courtesy of SFFILM.

LA CHIMERA: six genres for the price of one

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Photo caption: Carol Duarte and Josh O’Connor in LA CHIMERA. Courtesy of Neon.

The star of the Italian genre-shifter La Chimera is really its director, Alice Rohrwacher, with her inventive storytelling. Rohrwacher’s story does have a protagonist, Arthur (Josh O’Connor – the marriage-age Prince Charles in The Crown); when we meet him, he is grubby, weary and returning to a Tuscan village where his heart has been broken by a woman and where he has been betrayed by friends. We wonder what has drawn this Italian-speaking Englishman back to a place that hasn’t treated him well.

He shows up at the villa of Flora (Isabella Rossellini), the mother of his disappeared girlfriend, Beniamina. Flora adores him, and her new housekeeper/companion/voice student Italia (Carol Duarte) is quite taken by him. He is also welcomed by a rabble of village ne’er-do-wells, as rowdy and vibrant as Arthur is surly, and as course as Arthur is cultured.

It turns out that these vulgar roughnecks are tombaroli – nighttime robbers of ancient Etruscan graves, who then sell the artifacts to a more sophisticated fence, to be trafficked in the shady marketplace of antiquity dealers, collectors and ethically-challenged museums. It turns out that Arthur, who seems to know a lot about archaeology, has a gift in water-witching the locations of undiscovered tombs.

La Chimera, which has started out as a dramatic portrait of a man broken and alienated, becomes a heist procedural, and then a comic thriller, and a charming romance (as Italia gives Arthur “Italian lessons” in gestures, not vocabulary). There’s a sudden break in the fourth wall, a dream sequence with magical realism and even an homage to Mack Sennett. All the while, the tombaroli serve as a comic Greek chorus, right up to a neo-noir ending, dotted with yet more magical realism.

Here’s where La Chimera was a success for me. I always wanted to know what would happen next. I was continually surprised by the changes in tone. The Wife, however, thought that Rohrwacher threw in at least one genre too many.

But by bit, and rarely overtly, Rohrwacher unspools the mysteries of the backstory. Why is Arthur here? What happened to Beniamina? What is Arthur’s bond to these trashy scalliwags? Does Arthur have a professional training, a supernatural gift or both? By the end, we have a pretty good idea of the answers – well enough to make the story coherent without Rohrwacher spoonfeeding us all the exposition.

When I think about it, other than the novelty of the grave-robbing, the plot points are individually familiar – a bitter release from prison, heartbreak from losing a love, the heist, the noirish fatalism. What keeps us on our toes is the inventiveness in the film’s evolving tone.

However, my head was also more involved than my heart, probably because I cared about the the Flora and Italia characters so much more than I cared about Arthur.

The cast is very good, with Rossellini (what a treasure!) and Duarte as the standouts.

I appreciate a filmmaker who is always aware that she’s storytelling in cinema, instead of, for example, just filming a play. Rohrwacher takes full advantage of the opportunities to vary sequence, construction, and mood. La Chimera is a Must See for cinephiles.

Surf and Skate at SLO Film Fest

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DOGTOWN AND Z-BOYS

This year’s San Luis Obispo International Film Festival, opening April 23, presents the richest Skate/Surf program that I’ve ever seen at a mainstream film festival. Here are the highlights.

  • Friday, April 26: The always popular Surf Night featuring Trilogy: New Wave. Expect the Fremont to be packed again with surfers enjoying drinks in the lobby and the Riff Tide surf band before the screening. The documentary Trilogy: New Wave profiles three emerging pro stars on the world tour as they travel together to some of the world’s top surf destinations. The young guys are engaging and the audience will be stoked by the cinematography.
  • Sunday, April 28: The award-winning 2001 skateboard documentary Dogtown and Z-boys with the 2023 short 4DWN. The director of Dogtown and Z-boys, filmmaker and skateboard icon Stacy Peralta will attend; a surfer and one of the pioneers of modern skateboarding, and a founder of the Powell Peralta skateboard product company, Peralta also wrote the 2005 Lords of Dogtown. Beforehand, the audience can enjoy custom skateboard designs, with live-screen printing of these custom designs by the San Luis Obispo High School Advanced Graphic Design class.
  • Monday, April 29: The movie at the SLO Film Fest’s very first Surf Nite was the 2004 surf doc Riding Giants, also directed by Stacy Peralta. Riding Giants focuses on the obsessive search for the best wave by some of the greatest surfers in history. We see “the biggest wave ever ridden” and then a monster that could be bigger.  The movie traces the discovery of the Half Moon Bay surf spot Mavericks.  And more and more, all wonderfully shot. Fittingly, Riding Giants screens at the Bay in Morro Bay – only one mile from the surf lanes at Morro Rock. IMO, Riding Giants ranks with Dana Brown’s Step into Liquid as the greatest surf documentary ever.
RIDING GIANTS

Other skate/surf films include:

  • the seminal 1978 skateboard film Skateboard.
  • the 2024 documentary Art and Life: The Story of Jim Phillips, chronicling the most important figure ever in skateboard art (most famously the Screaming Hand and the Santa Cruz Red Dot). Phillips is a very sympathetic guy with an interesting personal journey. It’s well-sourced deep dive into skateboard art, skateboard manufacturing, surfing art and rock poster art, and almost everything happens just up the coast in Santa Cruz.

The entire surf and skate program at SLO Film Fest shreds. Here’s a clip from for Riding Giants:

Movies to See Right Now

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June Squibb and Fred Hechinger appear in THELMA, the closing night film of both the SFFILM and the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by David Bolen.

This week on The Movie Gourmet – we’re all about the upcoming SFFILM and SLO Film Festivals. Both fests start next week, and I’ll soon be posting my recommendations from both programs. The closing night film for both San Frnacisco and SLO is Thelma, which will become a popular hit when it’s released into theaters in June.

CURRENT MOVIES

WATCH AT HOME

Richard Basehart in HE WALKED BY NIGHT

The most eclectic watch-at-home recommendations you’ll find ANYWHERE:

ON TV

Richard Roundtree in SHAFT.

Richard Roundtree died last year, before the release of his very sweet final performance in Thelma. Roundtree’s FIRST MOVIE role was as the iconic John Shaft in Shaft. He went on to over 250 more screen credits, including four more as John Shaft. Although in my mind, the biggest star of Shaft was Isaac Hayes’ music, Richard Roundtree was, along with Pam Grier, the most significant on-screen force in Blaxploitation cinema. Turner Classic Movies is airing Shaft, on April 22.

Who’s the black private dick that’s a sex machine to all the chicks?

First Look at the 2024 SLO Film Fest

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June Squibb and Fred Hechinger appear in THELMA by Josh Margolin. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by David Bolen.

The 2024 SLO Film Fest opens on April 25 and celebrates its 30th festival, bringing its characteristic mix of aspirational cinema and sheer fun to California’s Central Coast. This year’s program will be presented at the Fremont, Palm and Downtown Centre in San Luis Obispo, and the Bay in Morro Bay. An encore week will play at at Paso Robles’ Park Cinemas May 1-5. There will also be a Virtual Encore for selected titles, also May 1-5.

Here are festival highlights:

  • The closing night film is a hoot – Thelma, starring 93-year-old June Squibb (Oscar-nominated for Nebraska) in an action picture. Squibb plays a scammed senior who goes on a quest to recover her money from the scammers. . I’ve seen it, and it’s a surefire audience-pleaser. Thelma also features indie favorite Parker Posey and the sweet final performance of Richard Roundtree (Shaft).
  • The opening night film is the family dramedy Ghostlight, also a Sundance hit, with the filmmakers in attendance.
  • The always popular Surf Night featuring Trilogy: New Wave. Expect the Fremont to be packed again with surfers enjoying drinks in the lobby and the Riff Tide surf band before the screening. The documentary Trilogy: New Wave profiles three emerging pro stars on the world tour as they travel together to some of the world’s top surf destinations. The young guys are engaging, and the audience will be stoked by the cinematography.
  • Surf night is only one part of the richest Skate/Surf program that I’ve ever seen at a mainstream film festival (and I’ll be writing more about it this week). Filmmaker and skateboard icon Stacy Peralta will attend the SLO Film Fest, which features two of his films, Dogtown and Z-boys and Riding Giants.
  • Actress/director Heather Graham will appear to receive an award, and present her new film Chosen Family.
  • A screening of Camera, filmed in Morro Bay, with appearances by star Beau Bridges and director Jay Silverman,
  • A 45th anniversary screening of the zombie classic Dawn of the Dead.
  • Audience favorites that reflect the 30 years of SLO Film Fest, including Double Indemnity, Big Night, Muriel’s Wedding, and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.
  • I haven’t seen this Canadian horror comedy, but it has my favorite title in the fest: Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person.

There’s plenty more, with features, workshops and six programs of shorts. I’m screening my way through the program, and will post my MUST SEE recommendations before the fest opens. Peruse the program and get your tickets at SLO Film Fest.