He Cinema du look was a term coined in the 1980s by film critic Raphael Bassan in 1986 to describe a set of films that shared certain stylistic and thematic characteristics, undertaken by directors who experimented with bold visual styles and unconventional narrative structures.
The most prominent directors associated with the Cinema du Look are Jean-Jacques Beineix (the author of Diva and the explosive erotic tape Betty Blue), Luc Besson (Deep blue, The Femme Nikita), Léos Carax (Lovers of the New Bridge, Pola X) and especially, the American Michael Mann (the author of films such as Thief and heat).
One of the most distinctive characteristics of Cinema du look It consisted of an emphasis on visual aesthetics over conventional narrative. Films of the movement often featured vibrant, saturated images, as well as careful attention to production design and visual composition. This stylistic approach was heavily inspired by fashion, advertising, and contemporary art, resulting in visually striking films that defied audience expectations.
While Mann and Besson try to recapture their glory days with lukewarm films, they fail to account for their enormous talent as Ferrari and DogMan, corresponds to Luca Guadagnino, this great Italian author consecrated by works such as I Am Love, Call Me By Your Name, Bones And All and the splendid remakes of The pool (A Bigger Splash) and Suspiria, resurrect the Cinema du look with a high-class stylistic exercise set in the world of tennis and known as Challengers.
The film written by playwright and novelist Justin Kuritzkes (the husband of Celine Song, the director of Past Lives), exudes sensuality and eroticism in each of the granules of the saturated photography of the Thai Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (frequent collaborator of Guadagnino and the master Apichatpong Weerasethakul).
Challengers (“challengers” in Spanish), is about a love triangle involving Art and Patrick, two friends and tennis prodigies (Mike Faist, the reporter for the magnificent The Bikeriders, and Josh O’Connor, Prince Charles from the series The Crown), both madly in love with Tashi, another tennis player as talented as them or more, but who emotionally becomes the equivalent of the ice pick used by Sharon Stone in Low instincts.
Kuritzkes and Guadagnino tell the story as if it were a tennis match (at the beginning of the film Tashi comments that relationships are like tennis and hence the title of Challengers). That is why it is narrated using multiple flashbacks and flash forwards that reveal important details about the relationship of these three athletes, lovers, friends and enemies, making our minds bounce from the past to the present in an indiscriminate way. This is why it is better not to reveal more of the plot (which, by the way, is the weak point of the film, since it is full of cheesy melodrama like the heat by Michael Mann).
What we do need to talk about is the viral phenomenon that caused the revelation of the scene of a fiery Ménage à trois between the girl and the two boys, which seems inspired by the forgotten and hot nineties film Threesome (which inspired the famous video lady of the electronic group Modjo) and in the even more ardent And Your Mother Too, in which the experienced Maribel Verdú invites the young people played by Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna to put aside their sexual repression and freely express their desire for each other (Freud said that the only thing that differentiates friendship from relationship is the exercise of sex). If you suspected that the scene was going to be highly exciting, well let me tell you that you are correct. We’re talking about the director of the peaches scene call me by your name.
The three protagonists of Challengers They are pheromonic and display high doses of sexuality. In reality, this is not a film about tennis but an erotic film through and through. But it is also a film that takes sides with men, who here are full of defects, but are also noble, fearful, value friendship, are dominated by their emotions and inevitably succumb to the love of a selfish woman, who only thinks about winning. , manipulating and imposing her will on the pair of lovers that she probably doesn’t really love (we don’t even see her worry in the slightest about her daughter, since everything revolves around her, putting her on the brink of sociopathy). But even though Zendaya’s character is absolutely detestable, she has the magnetic force and weight that only a great actress like her can achieve when embodying a character.
But the ingredient that makes Challengers an exquisite dish is in the soundtrack composed and performed by Trent Reznor and Atticus Rose, who go back to the industrial techno era of the late eighties that resulted in the album Pretty Hate Machine by Reznor (aka Nine Inch Nails) to charge every second of this tape masterfully edited by Marco Costa with overflowing energy. It is here that we understand how Guadagnino draws on Mann’s cinema and television.
The creator of Miami Vice understood, in a time of erotic comedies aimed at young people like Risky Business, of posters made with airbrushes, of the cult of the physique, synthesizer music and neon lights, that the essence of the video clip consisted of giving primacy to the musical text and energizing it with stylized and forceful images; and he applied this investment (music first image later) in television and then in cinema, with results that transformed modern cinema into contemporary cinema (let Quentin Tarantino, Edgar Wright, Guy Ritchie or Nicolas Winding Refn say so).
In Challengers Music is the real protagonist. You’ll want to go out and download Reznor and Rose’s music to make it the soundtrack to all your daily actions (exercising, driving, washing dishes, even writing about movies). Thanks to this duo of composers, tennis had never been felt in the cinema in such an intense way. This is rather Cinéma du sound.
