There was wild speculation as soon as Luca Guadagnino’s first trailer Challengers appeared online. There was a threesome in the director’s new tennis comedy that came before Call Me by Your Name made one of the most sensual films of the past decade? The trailer shows how tennis friends Patrick Zweig and Art Donaldson fall head over heels for the beautiful and hyper-talented rising tennis star Tashi Duncan and the three end up kissing on a bed.
But the trailer also showed that it does not lead to a harmonious ménage à trois. The friendship turns sour a decade later, even though things are still heated between Tashi and the two men and between the two men themselves: they exchange sneers while eating phallic-looking food or sweating together in the sauna. The self-proclaimed ‘homewrecker’ Tashi can no longer play tennis himself, but is married to Art and manages him as his ambitious coach.
The More The Messier
The film therefore seems to be a perfect addition to the list of films that can be seen on the streaming service MUBI under the heading ‘The More The Messier’. With various films about love triangles in which “all corners” touch each other, as the screenwriter of Challengers described his film.
Challengers initially seems to fit in with the films in which love triangles end quite disastrously. With the highlight of course being the great example of all ménage à trois films: Jules and Jim (1962). In François Truffaut’s revolutionary classic we follow the friendship of Austrian Jules and Frenchman Jim in Paris shortly before the First World War. They live a bohemian life without worries, full of art and women. Until they both fall for the spontaneous and completely fickle Catherine.
Jules marries her, but eventually asks Jim to come live with them and marry her. After all, Catherine is unhappy and repeatedly engages in affairs. Jules hopes to be able to keep her with him this way. The three briefly lead an idyllic ménage à threeis. However, their jealous disregard for social conventions and judgments of others does not lead to lasting happiness. When Catherine and Jim’s romance breaks down because they fail to have a child, she ends up killing herself and her future husband. Jules is left alone.
Even in the decades that followed, screenwriters often seem to have difficulty ending stories about love triangles and ménages à threeis without deaths or characters left damaged and alone. In hit Y tu mamá también (2001), twenty-something Luisa, who takes care of the sexual coming-of-age of two teenagers, turns out to be secretly terminal. The long-time friends lose all contact after the road trip on which they have sex with Luisa separately and with the three of them.
In Bernardo Bertolucci’s sensual The Dreamers (2003), the love triangle between a naive American student and a brother and sister in Paris at the end of the 1960s ends with disillusionment and characters who quite symbolically choose violence over love during a demonstration. But the MUBI list also includes the recent ones, for example Passages (2023), where the narcissistic and egocentric protagonist tries to have a relationship with both his husband and the woman who carries his child. To end up alone.
Although since Jules and Jim countless taboos have disappeared, characters who opt for a love triangle in films seem to be regularly ‘punished’ for this. Yet moralism that seeps through? After all, it’s reminiscent of how queer characters, before they became more mainstream in films, often ended up dead and alone. Or is it because screenwriters simply cannot imagine how it could succeed? The films implicitly and explicitly put forward numerous arguments as to why love triangles do not work, such as inevitable jealousy or that it is only about sex, so it must ultimately fail. In Challengers Guadagnino’s striking camera work continuously suggests a ‘power imbalance’ between his main characters, which makes a healthy relationship impossible.
His camera regularly looks ‘down’ on people together with a character. As a viewer you see how Tashi often watches the two men from a higher point of view. But Patrick and Art also look at each other from remarkable angles that often suggest something about who currently holds the better cards in terms of tennis and relationships. Moments when the trio are shown at each other’s eye level? For example, while playing tennis and when they briefly kiss on the bed.
Also read
the review of ‘Challengers’
Provocative comedies
Yet there are certainly films in which the main characters of a ménage à threeis end up together. Although these are often wonderfully provocative and scabrous comedies. Like the witty Brazilian one Dona Flor and her two Husbands (1976). In it, the adulterous, money-wasting and aggressive husband of main character Flor falls dead one day. She then marries the decent but boring pharmacist, but lacks the bedside qualities of her former husband Vadinho. When he suddenly appears as a naked ghost, she eventually allows him to stay with them.
Even more daring, especially today, is the British one Rita, Sue and Bob Too by the British Alan Clarke from 1987, based on the semi-autobiographical play by Andrea Dunbar. In it, two teenage girls begin an affair with a married man for whom they babysit. After many upheavals, in which the deeply tragic background and poverty of the characters sometimes come to the fore, the trio ends in a cheerful ménage à trois that offers little prospect.
In the more recent triangle comedy Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) by Woody Allen, it ultimately does not end as dramatically as in Jules and Jim. Yet the love triangles that arise prove untenable and a passionate gunshot is fired. Allen said at the time that the ménage à trois in which Scarlett Johansson’s character ends up might have a chance of success with the fictional characters in his film: “freak artists who have a larger than life have a vision on things.” In real life, “it is hard enough to have a relationship with one person, but with three it ends geometrically fatal.”
Guadagnino solves the ‘three body problem’ in his own unique way; it remains to be seen whether Challengers is the start of a new boom of more upbeat films about love triangles. The happier ending films often date from the 1970s. Now that interest in alternative forms of relationships is increasing again, you would expect films in which love triangles do not necessarily end fatally.
To share
Email the editor
Tags: Threesomes rarely films
-
