Challengers Represents a Challenge for Zendaya.

“Challengers” the latest from autuer Luca Guadagnino is the tale of a couple Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick (Josh O’Connor) who then becomes a throuple when they meet the enigmatic and stunning Tashi (Zendaya) and the torrid stormy road they take to being able to fully become who they are, who they want to be. A movie so tethered to a foundational need, to desire, to sex, to hunger couldn't have been more bland and worse still, clumsy. Guadagnino’s latest is supposed to feel like a light hand under your shirt, in the small of your back, gliding upwards pressing on some muscles, sliding in others until it reaches the nape of your neck and pricks you deeply with a sharp fingernail. Instead Challengers "sex scenes" and it's ploys for lust and desire feel like someone making a bunch of racket as they try and sneak up behind you only to grab you by your neck and bang your head on the table. Every single moment felt forced, abrupt, there was no sense of timing, no sense of patience, and no true willingness to go “there”. Guadagnino likes to give us tantalization as pure presentation and it never works for me. He keeps his camera still and at a distance, it sits there like an observer who is outwardly about as moved by it as Spock. The camera is never there with its subjects in the ways Adrian Lyne voyeuristically enjoys Fatal Attraction, or the way Paul Verhoeven allows the camera to make it a throuple in “Basic Instinct”. In “Call Me By Your Name”, there is the infamous fruit scene, the camera nearly falls asleep as Chalamet commits to the act with all the passion of turning a doorknob..Where is the writhing, the self touching, why are his shorts still on? For an act so based in unbridled desire it feels like Ben Stein giving a class on lust. The director always seems trapped in a purgatory where longing and lust are in direct conflict. He never wants his subjects through the camera, he's rarely interested in their faces when they're burning for each other, just when they're attracted to each other. His choices are dull and it effects or maybe shows itself in his choice of actors who are the hinges upon which this doorway into desire hang. Zendaya in what many are calling a movie star showing is the prime manifestation of this conflation. Some have said this movie doesn’t work without her and they’re right…it doesn’t.

Zendaya is one of cinemas great movers, I believe that is what people most see when they talk about her movie star power. She is elegant but forceful, composed and lithe. It shows in the scene where Patrick first introduces her to us and Art, her body commits to every end position with force, but the getting there is smooth and wave like. Its much like the catwalk, the step into the ground is a earth, but the body before the step is water. Zendaya in so many ways resembles a cat, but she hasn't met a director yet who is interested in or wants to play with that energy and she's seems too interested in protecting herself to bring it out on her own. Sex and playing “sex” or “sexy” is about letting go. You have to be unafraid to let the camera as a disembodied partner see your primal self. Think about the way Jamie Lee Curtis performs this exact act in James Cameron’s “True Lies”. Playing a woman who has never done anything truly adventurous, who has always been prudent, a woman who wants more but has no idea how to get there -Curtis starts off stiff very aware of herself, and her watcher, but slowly, surely, she stops protecting herself and begins to lean into feeling her body, opening up the camera to her most sensual self, and by consequence we voyeuristically join, the man in front of her all but disappears. Zendaya’s Tashi is no Helen Tasker, but Zendaya herself reminds me of her in this small regard; she has made to date, prudent choices, smart choices, but she has not been adventurous in choosing her roles, and though this is her attempt, much like Helen Tasker in the beginning of her dance, she doesn't seem to really know how to get there. Zendaya has no moment in Challengers, where sensuality, sex, or unbridled emotion feel as if they have taken over her body even while she is in control. No encapsulation of Meg Ryan's orgasm scene in “When Harry met Sally”. In essence some true sense that while everyone is turned on, or appalled by her being seemingly lost in the throws of her own self passion, she was in full control and putting on a show the entire time.

I feel much of the same way about Zendaya as I do Michael B Jordan, two actors with untapped potential that remains corked under the fact that they never seem to let us into that hidden self, or to that creation of self that appears knowable, that calls us to peer inside them on camera. They have the looks, they have to a certain extent - the energy, but they seem to always be protecting themselves. Image production is of course a responsibility and an aspect of any acting career, but as with all things it's a spectrum that is in a different place for each actor it represents. Those actors we revere for their acting not for their image production is a result of their leaning being further on the spectrum towards the craft than it is towards the image, with Zendaya and Jordan, it's more image production than craft to an extreme. True vulnerability almost always seems to escape them, and any true sense that they are giving themselves over to us escapes us. Tashi may move as if she is always aware the camera is on her, but Zendaya should move as if the the camera is apart of her. Tashi may not be open to letting anyone in, but Zendaya should be sneaking us in through the back door. In one of her stronger scenes in the movie, Tashi and Patrick are involved in a conversation where her true desires have been have been exposed, it is in essence quite possibly the summation of Tashi as a character, and yet it's telling that outside of aesthetics nothing profound occurs in Zendaya's face and body. Whenever there comes a time for an interesting emotion of expression Zendaya performs the one that would get you the least points in “Family Fued, because it is the one that would come most readily to just about anyone. What Patrick is telling her is meant to cause a mixture of shock, hurt, attraction, and anger, because it is based in truth, (we know by what she does later) Zendaya only plays anger. One eye widens larger than the other, the rest of her face appears pained, constipated, as if Patrick is speaking is foreign language she struggles to understand. This is not bad if the only idea is that this idea is detestable to Tashi, and she wants Patrick to feel that way, but the audience should see what's going on underneath as well and the “underneath” is what Zendaya has trouble playing. Critic Angelica Jade Bastien was absolutely right when she connected Zendaya's acting with the Katherine Hepburn quote about Meryl Steep, you can most certainly “hear the wheels turning“, because Zendaya is thinking more than she's feeling . If you only pay attention to how she moves, how picturesque she is, you might be impressed but when you listen to how she cuts Patrick down, and you watch her face it's banal, far too straightforward there's no knife to it, it sounds mean, because the words are there, but she delivers them in exactly that energy with no interestimg curve. Often the most interesting and cutting words we've seen on screen have been delivered in the opposite energy, you don't get angry, you smile. You don't play emotive anger you calmly and cooly say “You're nothing to me but another dead vampire”, or you if actually pierced you allow a tiny face drop, near imperceptible, but a clear receipt. Zendaya'‘s face does not betray her, and Zendaya is not vulnerable enough to break through facade in the least, especially subtly. When she walks away it's a thing of beauty, if you're just watching the walk, but in her face, nothing. The anger she shows provides no interesting choice, merely furrowed eyebrows. The opening salvo between Michael Douglas's Dan Gallagher and Glenn Closes's Alex Forrest in “Fatal Attraction” is a Master class in the importance of A; a director knowing the value of direct close ups in titilation and anticipation, and B. two actors that understand the subtleties of facade and how and when it breaks. Gallagher wants to play the loyal husband merely here for an innocent drink, Alex sees through it and start sending arrows directly at him. Glenn Close’s poker Face and the subtle brakes in Douglas that ultimately lead to the sex scene are vital to what makes Fatal Attraction one of the sexiest movies of all time.

Zendaya does not appear to be a good poker player, Tashi needs to appear that way. The bedroom is one of the few places that Tashi can exert control and uninhibited desire, where her true face should come through crystal clear, not necessarily to the boys, but to the audience. Guadagnino could've helped her. A bedroom scene with Patrick is so stilted as to conjure no appetite whatsoever. He shoots it from medium wide, (why?) this is a form of intimacy, even if Tashi is a bit mathematic about sex we should see Patrick's desire for the fantasy in contrast to Tashi's desire for control and power. On the surface level Patrick and Tashi have this in common with Catherine Trammel and Nick Curran of “Basic Instinct” ; Patrick like Nick knows exactly who and what his “Catherine” is, he just doesn't care. He wants her badly enough not to. These are the moments for interesting choices in a scene, from all involved in that dirk room. See Eihi Shiina’s wildly over the top movements as she saws off Ryo Ishibashi’s foot in “Audition”. In that scene, mutilation is made decadent. This is Asami’s bedroom, and the mutilation is her sex, and the reckless abandon and joy she receives is thick in Shiina's movements and expressions. Director Takashi Miike's camera goes in close and personal, intimately because here is where Asami finally has control, here is where the facade breaks, where her true self is revealed and the coy child like fantasy is peeled away. In contrast Challengers will have no such moment with Tashi, nor with Zendaya. There's a scene where Tashi deeply hurt by something that has happened to her, you can't tell it's supposed to have hit her hard, she nearly drops under a tree and it all kind of comes crashing down. Again, there are no interesting choices. Zendaya isn’t patient enough, she isn't open enough. She sits there for a moment and nothing radiates, no rage, no sense she is truly trying to hold back against a rising tide in her body. Guadagnino goes in for a close up on her face and nothing really happens. These are the moments where actors are made. The emoting with Zendaya is never bad, it's just never great, or distinctive, or provocative. Tashi is an example of a number of women I've seen on screen the kind that are aware of this stipulations and gendered expectations the world places up on them and in this case most especially as a black woman or even more specifically a biracial black woman, and yet Zendaya seems as disinterested in this aspect as the movie is in it. There may be the tiniest of hints and illusions as to how her race plays into all this but there is definitely no sincere interest to explore this aspect of Tashi. Guadagnino and Zendaya could do to have taken a look at Viola Davis and Steven McQueen in Widows where despite the fact that Viola's character clearly moves in white circles her blackness within them plays a significant role in what we are seeing in the movie as well as what we see in Viola herself. Veronica Rawlings is overall quite a different woman from the much younger Tashi, but they do have in common the shared desire to keep it together. They are both manipulators and they both deeply understand the value society places on appearances, they have to. Yet Viola creates these profound moments of breakage, moments where the mask slips where she must find some place for this energy to go. Whether after being slapped by Elizabeth Debicki, or in her final scene. The most representative of what the vast difference is, is in the opening scene when she finds out that her husband is dead. The stare in the mirror that turns into a primal scream and then the immediate fixture, back to work, “I will not let this consume me” even as it is consuming her. I believe Tashi seen under the tree should have been that kind of moment, not the exact same moment but the same art in a sense that she needed to be somewhere where she could let it go for just a moment, pull it back together, and get back in the game. Zendaya doesn't omit, she clearly emotes, she just simply doesn't do anything interesting with it and maybe more importantly neither does Guadagnino. Challengers and its star ends up a missed opportunity for the kind of potential that exists for films to make a return to eroticism and for movie stars to make a return to form. There are suggestions, there are implications, and there are a few exciting moments where it feels like we are back, but for most and much of this movie it feels like wanting to play in the snow but only being able to watch it on the inside of a globe. There's something there, but I wasn't able to feel it and as such eventually I just put it back down.