by Robert Bouffard, Editor
It would be easy to argue that playing tennis and having sex are the same thing. In fact, the film supposes that the former is even more erotic. Tennis is intimate. You grow close to your opponent as you’re playing. And when you repeatedly play the same opponent over the course of years and years, that intimacy deepens.
But tennis is also a competition, and when three people are addicted to competition, you get Challengers, a film where every interaction between the three main characters — Tashi Donaldson (Zendaya), Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) — features someone trying to gain an edge or using strategic methods to get and stay ahead. In their minds, giving up competing means abandoning who you truly are and what you truly love. These characters can only respect the people closest to them when they’re trying to use or get the best of each other, because that’s how they say they love each other.
Director Luca Guadagnino naturally films conversations between our three leads like they are tennis matches, with a camera that whips back and forth, quickly cuts to different angles to give us the most pointed view at the action, or, at times, one which holds on a shot to allow us to see everything that’s going on in its full glory. In films like Call Me by Your Name and Bones and All, Guadagnino’s romances are tender if still tortured. But while Challengers is in many ways singular amidst his filmography, it falls closer to his earlier works like I Am Love and A Bigger Splash, where the love being depicted, while earnest, is more turbulent. In those films, the love (and attraction) between two people almost always comes at the expense of another person, which is where Challengers finds itself.
The film — which in total spans nearly two decades — opens with Art and Tashi as a married tennis power couple with a young daughter. Art is about to play a match, which, if he wins, would qualify him for the upcoming U.S. Open. Winning the open would give him a Career Grand Slam. Tashi, who pulls double duty as his coach, gives him some last minute tips and instructions, before Art proceeds to lose in embarrassing fashion, and it seems like he’s mostly washed up. As a last attempt at relevance, Art enters a Challenger event, which, again, if won, would qualify him for the Open. It just so happens that Art’s ex best friend, Patrick, is entered in the same event. But unlike Art and Tashi, Patrick is introduced as a down-on-his luck loser who can’t even afford breakfast before his match, let alone a night in a hotel to rest up. The two former friends play their hardest in their first few matches and find themselves matched up in the Challenger final.
As it turns out, this is a culmination of those two decades. In fact, it’s even longer, because Art and Patrick have been best friends for about four years when we meet them as 16-year-olds. They’ve been roommates at a tennis academy, and as Tashi points out when she first meets them after her U.S. Open junior championship, there’s probably a little bit more than friendship between them. (Guadagnino highlights this as they lasciviously scarf down hot dogs together after their own U.S. Open junior doubles championship, aggressively devour churros as their faces are crammed in tight closeups in a more passive aggressive time in their relationship, and when Patrick mockingly eats a banana while winking at Art between sets of their final match.) Their introduction to Tashi, during which they dub her the most beautiful person they’ve ever seen, takes their already rivalrous relationship to a new level. Despite their shared doubles championship, they’re set to face off for the same amongst the singles, and Tashi says the winner of that match is the one who will get her number.
And thus, a relationship that was already built on competition is no longer strictly about tennis. Tashi says she doesn’t want to become a home wrecker, but with her beauty and magnetism, by entering into their lives, that’s exactly what she is. The film’s framing device of the Challenger championship match is a microcosm of their relationship: Art and Patrick are in a lifelong, sensual push-and-pull, and Tashi’s Strangers on a Train-esque still head amidst the constantly turning ones of the rest of the crowd shows she’s right in the middle of it all.
Because Tashi needs this competition as much as her “little white boys” do. She was the most promising high school prospect of the three of them, but an injury in college has kept her on the sidelines. Tashi deeply understands the blurred line between sex and tennis, and has to watch as the one opponent who came close to being her equal lives the professional life she was supposed to. Zendaya, who already wowed us once this year on the big screen with Dune: Part Two, further shows off her abilities with a seductive yet fully in-control performance. Tashi’s the object of desire for Art and Patrick and she knows it, so she uses that knowledge to pull the strings of competition in a way she can’t with her injury. As the tagline on the film’s IMAX poster says: “Her game. Her rules.”
All that these people want is competition with each other. Art is becoming inert as a person with his competition being lackluster, and Patrick is a mess. Faist, whose big screen breakout came in the Steven Spielberg version of West Side Story, has a more quiet charisma than in the hit musical, but he still commands the screen (33 to 50% of it at least, depending on how much of it he’s sharing with his costars at a given moment), while O’Connor’s charmingly conniving nature is increasingly illuminated as the movie progresses.
These rivalries drive the characters, and Guadagnino reteams with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross to perfectly underscore the film’s tone. At times, it’s reminiscent of their high-energy electric score from The Social Network, but it also works in more eerily calm piano melodies like they used in Empire of Lightand Bones and All.
But it’s always the high-bpm synths which are memorable, as they’re present in the hypnotically intense yet rousingly thrilling scenes where tennis is actually being played. Guadagnino goes no-holds-barred: The ball is hit directly at the camera, the ever-curious camera whirls around the court as we simultaneously try to pay attention to conversations and activity alike, we have GoPro shots. In the final sequence, Guadagnino pulls out all the tricks he’s been hiding up to that point, and we get shots where the camera lens is the ground and POV shots of the ball itself. A slow motion callback to an earlier scene literalizes the leaning-forward meme, as anything can now happen.
It would all be uncommonly mesmerizing if we weren’t also focusing on the physical specimens of the actors — Faist is bulky and O’Connor is toned, and they’re both drenched in the most appealing sweat you’ll ever see. We watch in super slow motion as the beads roll down their face, sometimes even landing on the lens, dousing us in these characters’ irresistibility. It’s a love triangle for the ages, and at any point, in any scene, each character could be with another. And each of the possible combinations is as enticing as the next.
But Challengers, in its exuberance, lust, and passion, still allows you to appreciate the turmoil that this sort of life leads to. No one is ever satisfied except for during the high of a battle. Guadagnino has never shied away from intense fervor of love, but here, he uniquely vilifies the way his characters go about achieving it, setting it apart even from Call Me by Your Name’s Oliver, Bones and All’s Lee and Maren, or all four characters in A Bigger Splash. Because the problem with a high is that you have to come down from it. And while our characters’ crash is ironically a moment of elation, and now that this Challenger championship match is over, we know that there’s still a lot of tennis for them to play.
Rating: Loved It
Challengers is currently playing in theaters
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