"Challengers" Serves it Right

In late April, Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers (featuring Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, and Mike Faist) debuted and frankly I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. The movie opens with, and essentially revolves around, the title match of a second-tier challenger tournament in New Rochelle. The unlikeliness of that kind of setting for a movie of this caliber – decent budget, acclaimed filmmaker, and talented stars on the rise – points to the movie’s great tension between pulp and art; this is one of the film’s greatest strengths and the key reason why I dug it so much. The cast and crew’s ability to elevate what is a goofy and slightly trashy story into genuine art makes it an even more significant achievement in my mind than something that takes itself extremely seriously. Not all “important” movies need to be about “important” topics, or even have life-or-death stakes in them to emotionally involve an audience. If we’re able to overlook the genuine silliness of the trappings of the Mad Max films or the genuine dumbness of the lore that powers John Wick’s underworld because of what else those films accomplish, why not this one too? This is a story of a messy love triangle built on fractured relationships in the cutthroat world of professional tennis that climaxes in, I’ll say it again, New Rochelle. I’ll do my best to avoid spoiling every last detail about this film, but in my gushing over it that might just be inevitable.

Pulpy Bones. I’ll try and keep spoilers light, but to convey the inherent “low art” of this story, I’ve got to at least highlight some of the key events – feel free to skip further down. Ok, here we go:

Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick (Josh O’Connor) are best friends and talented doubles partners who are both blown away by Tashi (Zendaya), the hottest (in every way) prospect of youth tennis. The three of them almost have a threesome, but Tashi leaves after tricking Art and Patrick into making out. Patrick ends up dating Tashi while he’s on tour and she and Art go to Stanford, where Art begins to worm his way into their relationship. Tashi and Patrick have a fight, Tashi suffers an injury that ends her career, and so now he’s out of the picture. Art later becomes a successful pro on the rise, and Tashi comes to him wanting to be his coach, and becomes his girlfriend, then fiancée, then wife. He enjoys a successful career and is contemplating retirement when Tashi convinces him to make one last run at a US Open title, and crushing the New Rochelle challenger tournament is a good first start. Lo and behold, waiting for him in the championship is none other than Patrick.

If you feel like that story belongs to the world of straight-to-streaming silliness like this year’s The Idea of You, I’d tend to agree. The almost-threesome that featured heavily in the marketing of this movie points to a kind of raciness we don’t always see on the big screen, and a story about three people falling in and out of love with each other over the course of a decade also doesn’t pass the “theatrical” sniff test – something I’d argue is an ugly side-effect of the streaming business, and not the movies finally “getting it right.” If the events of the plot were all that mattered, we wouldn’t have movies or even books; it’s the telling that matters, and this one is full of depth that its “sexy tennis” label belies.

Lust, Longing, and Competition. You might be tempted, given the sexual fluidity that the characters express and the lust that clearly drives them, into thinking that this is just a “romantic” drama or “love triangle” movie, which is both true and false. It’s true that Tashi dates one, then marries the other, of our two titular challengers, and that her involvement in their lives is what drives them apart. What’s false is to assume that’s the beginning and the end of the movie’s tension. It’s rare that all sides of a love triangle genuinely touch, and while Art and Patrick never really act on their desires except when tricked to (though they don’t complain), they were a key part of each other’s sexual awakening and Tashi enters their lives claiming she doesn’t want to be a “homewrecker.” Screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes uses this rich love triangle and the competitive tennis landscape to explore lust, longing, and competition – the combination of the three is what motivates each character. Tashi’s character especially is driven by one thing and one thing only: competition. Not winning necessarily, but of achieving a union with one’s opponent in vying for victory through a kind of mutual perfection. It’s not about perfecting one’s game necessarily, but of the rush that playing “perfect tennis” brings; it takes two to tango. If you’re drawing any allusions to sex, you’re barking up the right tree as this movie makes sex into the underlying force behind tennis (and everything else) and tennis the underlying force behind sex (and everything else). There’s a version of this movie that’s about a 1-on-1 combat sport like wrestling or boxing that’s just as effective in these metaphors, but tennis is the perfect match for its aesthetic (or perhaps, the aesthetic is perfect for tennis) and liberated sexuality.

Screenplay and Structure. Even though this movie features romantic entanglements, it’s anything but sappy, as Kuritzkes explores these themes with an acidic sensibility. These characters are vicious on and off the court, often delivering the pointed daggers that only people who know each other in and out can wield. The great idea that movie has is that’s all a part of the cutthroat competition, and that giving in to the dark impulses in this regard is what creates the “perfect competition”. Iron sharpens iron, and this is not a world for the weak. When these characters are verbally tearing each other’s souls out, they are competing as perfectly as they could on the tennis court, and that to compete perfectly on the court means tearing each other’s souls out. As they do so, the dialogue doesn’t feel “elevated” and there aren’t a ton of showy moments in the script, but their words are nevertheless perfect for this “low” material delivered with “high” sensibilities.  An interesting film to partner with this one would be Celine Song’s Past Lives, not just because she’s married to Justin Kuritzkes, or because both films open with a two-male-one-female trio in a public setting that has far more under the surface than meets the eye, or even because one of those males is relatively “beta” compared to the other, but because Past Lives is full of similarly cutting yet unassuming dialogue. Where that film cuts to create pangs of sadness borne from impossible and unspoken longing, this film cuts to find weakness in each character and either exploit it or eliminate it. Beyond simply their words, these characters are also constantly playing mind games with each other, and it’s a great deal of fun to parse through each scene to try and understand what is genuine and what isn’t; the notion that everything is a competition points to more “genuine” moments being anything but, though the characters are clearly wounded by each other’s brutality.

This film is also immaculately structured, as we open on the New Rochelle tennis match and frequently cut back to key stretches of time along the way. As we approach the end of the film’s runtime, however, the structure loosens up even further, as we’ll get to the day before the match, then a year earlier, then the night before the match, and then earlier again. The effect of this time-shifting is realized each time we return to the match in New Rochelle; we have different conflicting feelings with every point we then see conceded, and notice the interplay between Art, Patrick and Tashi watching from the front row in even deeper detail. Who we “root” for is almost always up to us, not by fault but by design. Yet again, this is highly sophisticated stuff for a movie about a few tennis players falling in and out of love with each other.

Performance and Aesthetics. The three leads are each excellent. Mike Faist fully delivers on the promise of his 2021 screen debut in West Side Story, and he gives Art much more sensitivity and humanity than his two counterparts. That’s by design, and is an undercurrent of his relationship with Tashi, who clearly wishes he were fiercer despite his success. Josh O’Connor, who I first saw in The Crown, is simply excellent as the scummy Patrick, who is certainly the fiercer competitor of the two, but Art might just be the superior player. He is far closer to open bisexuality than Art, but even that label doesn’t quite fit the man who wants to screw/eat/destroy almost everything in his orbit. Together, the two are funny, playful, near-flirtatious, and we never lose the sense that they are constantly sizing each other up – as potential lovers or competitors, it makes no difference. Zendaya gives a very sophisticated performance as Tashi, who while being the most singularly driven character in the movie might also be its most complex and conflicted. As the film progresses and she’s revealed to resent having “settled” for Art and even backslides into cheating on him with Patrick, she clearly knows what she’s doing is wrong but also NEEDS the vicarious high of competition that she seeks to wring out of her “two little white boys.” If these characters aren’t as finely drawn and performed as they are, this movie has no meaning or impact, as it’s on us to read just behind each glance, movement, and scene to examine them for who they are and access everything Kuritzkes is trying to communicate, and that’s always possible. Together with all that high-minded stuff is the junky fact that these are three beautiful people giving physical performances, and the camera captures them exquisitely.

Speaking of the camera, it’s been far too long since I’ve mentioned director Luca Guadagnino, who (and there’s no better way to say this) shoots the hell out of this thing. He breaks out every trick in the book, including some we didn’t even know were in the book, to help elevate the melodrama into high art. Sometimes, he’ll allow the camera to linger in a long take to capture an entire argument that gets out of hand quick; sometimes, he allows his editor Marco Costa to create his own rhythm that accentuate the “cuts” of dialogue I was writing about earlier; sometimes, he goes as far as to employ shots from the POV of the tennis players and even the tennis ball in a scene that almost had me levitating out of my seat. And though he succeeds in elevating this material, he too embraces its frivolous aspects: when Tashi gives in to Patrick’s advances, she does so in a windstorm of trash, which plays as both an effective action scene and a self-aware acknowledgement of what kind of people and material we’re watching, a master can do both. Everything looks both gorgeous and a little repulsive, including what clothes and facial hair Patrick is sporting, and the simple New Rochelle tennis court that is the home of this epic confrontation. Accentuating his every choice is a thrilling and propulsive electronic/house soundtrack from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross that is similarly slightly self-aware, but also lifts the themes of Kuritzkes’ script to the forefront of the audience’s minds. It also adds to the visceral intensity of the movie, so that in the final point of the final match (a tiebreak, of course) when all the emotional intensity of the characters and what motivates them is fully unleashed, as is Guadagnino’s cinematic acrobatics, we’re all fully caught up in the moment. The perfect rush, the perfect high, the perfect competition.