by Mattie Lucas
Cinema from a Decidedly Queer Perspective
Challengers | 2024
One need not be particularly interested in sports to find Luca Guadagnino's new tennis drama, Challengers, compelling. Guadagnino frames his tennis matches as either gladiatorial blood sports or sex, and sometimes both at the same time. Tennis is a relationship, Zendaya's Tashi Donaldson explains; and indeed, the tennis matches here are often thinly veiled stand-ins for dialogue the characters are either unwilling or unable to have.
For most of its life, the Cannon Group was a minor studio known for brawny B-movies like Death Wish, Cobra, Missing in Action, and Masters of the Universe. But during the 1980s, under the direction of co-owners Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, who bought the company in 1979, Cannon also used some of its profits to take chances on risky auteur-driven projects in an attempt to gain some prestige. One such project was Jean-Luc Godard's King Lear, a deal Golan and Globus infamously made with Godard on a napkin at the Cannes Film Festival, where the pair were tenaciously courting filmmakers.