Challengers: The Zendayas play tennis and drama, and it’s fun to watch

Tennis court aesthetics is one of the biggest clichés of our time. Another question is when the Challengers producers first got their hands on Justin Kuritzkes’ script, little did they know that every second video clip shoot and every second amateur model shoot would take place on tennis courts in the years to come. Although they may have known, they were just like that if anyone, Luca Guadagnino has the eye to bring a unique vision to the boring aesthetics of the sport.

THE Challengers his story jumps in the story of three young tennis players who are brought together by fate in their junior years. Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick (Josh O’Connor) have been friends since childhood, and then Tashi (Zendaya), the biggest young talent in women’s tennis, comes into their lives. less thoughtful and caring. Art and Patrick find themselves in a well-known situation: for a while it’s ecstatic to fall in love with the same girl, because it’s a collective experience to drool over it, and then when (after a bizarre “triangle”) the moment comes for Tashi to choose between them, their friendship begins to deteriorate. The story jumps through the lives of the characters in such a way that it culminates in the latest scene in the chronological order, in a tennis match played in the finals of a high-profile tournament against each other. The development of the match accompanies the film, while we get to know the antecedents.

There is nothing more toxic than a love triangle

Not afraid of stereotyping, the creators classify the two male protagonists into two archetypes. Patrick is a brown-haired, laid-back, instinctive talent who doesn’t care about the future, and is primarily motivated by having fun. The blond Art, on the other hand, is a hard-working figure who always strives to make the “right” decision, who compensates with work for not being born with such talent. In the end, life (the writer) rewards him for this: he is the only one of our protagonists who becomes an A-list tennis player.

His other apparent reward is that (this is revealed at the beginning of the film, but for those who are also bothered by this, I would indicate that it is a SPOILER) apparently the girl will also be his, another issue is that as we progress in the game time, this seems less and less like a reward. Tashi, Zendaya’s character, is closer to – in the scientific sense – psychopathy than any other character. Throughout, she remains Art’s coach rather than her emotional partner, “choosing” him as her life partner because of his athletic attitude, while physically she is apparently more attracted to the other man until the last minute.

Otherwise, it doesn’t feel like the film intends to portray Tashi as a psychopath, in fact, it tries to empathize with her at several points, but – and perhaps this is the biggest problem with the entire work – it leaves this exclusively to close-up shots and Zendaya’s complex acting, and does not provide such a life story , with a set of motivations that would make it clear why this woman is incapable of giving love to others. We can blame it on the injury, but long before the – extremely shockingly presented – knee injury, he plays with other people’s feelings, and we never actually find out why he is the way he is.

In any case, at one point the viewer gives up on trying to empathize with her character, and this point is her conversation with her own husband:

– All I ask is that you love me unconditionally.

– What am I, Jesus?

The auditorium erupts in laughter, but we feel that in the context of a marriage of many years, nothing more serious could be said.

In addition, the Challengers one of his greatest virtues is also related to this: he doesn’t really want to show one character as more likable than the other, even though the stereotypes he works with could even drive him to do so. The hard-working Art is perhaps the closest to being morally identifiable, but his submissiveness and sometimes calculating behavior distance him from the viewer. Patrick’s attitude to life is also not one that we can necessarily find sympathetic, while he is actually a good-natured figure in his own way, so we can’t say that the film is anchored by Art’s character at all.

Rather, its purpose is to show how toxic a love triangle can be, especially if the person jumping between the two is not willing to let go of one for the other. Although time passes and Tashi becomes a serious tennis coach and business woman, she does not develop enough emotionally, she tries to solve the lack of real care with her intellect and falls into it again and again, causing continuous injuries to two other people.

The film’s jumping back and forth time management works because it can constantly juxtapose or even contrast the old and new nature of the characters. It shows how they change and yet the mistakes they make over and over again. Especially the female protagonist, who for this reason is perhaps the most important character, not because she gets more playing time than the others, but because she is by far the most complex. That’s why it’s a shame that we still have a feeling of missing the nuances of his character.

At the same time, this feeling of absence is a burden on the writer and the director, and not on Zendaya, who is perhaps playing the biggest role of her career so far. On the one hand, his role is diverse, because he has to show the sassy An 18-year-old girl who plays with the feelings of two boys, on the other hand, she has to show an insensitive thirty-year-old woman who is lost in her career due to an injury, who tries to compensate for the failure of her playing career with success as a coach, and is able to see her own husband as a sports project rather than a love partner. . The film places its finger on any point in the time plane, the actress is fine with what she is doing, but this is also true for the other two main characters, who perfectly match the aforementioned archetypes at any point in the story and their character development.

So it works very well as the film jumps around in time, and it doesn’t do it for its own sake, because it constantly gives the viewer something to lean on. Another question is whether that selfishness is imposed on us towards the end of the film Challengers. The ending seems especially overwritten, and moreover, it weakens the serious human dramas it talks about into evidence. He leaves almost nothing open, instead he tries to compensate for the fact that he works with clarity in the last third with a completely random ending. Without spoilers, it is not worth saying more about the ending of the film.

It looks and sounds like a dream

From Luca Guadagnino, a Call me by your name and the Bones and all of course, we would sooner expect a visual orgy from its director than a consistent plot management or well-thought-out character portrayal, and in this respect the Challengers. He gives a specific approach to the clichéd tennis aesthetics already mentioned above, which only he can do. Beautiful people play the most elegant sport in the world with beautiful moves, while in every stroke there is pain, rage and passion for the game.

The colors are catchy, and the rhythm of the editing is unique and characterful, and although we have criticized the vagueness of the characters’ motivations, the dynamic between them is in constant motion and always brutally layered, and the viewer feels that they are shared throughout, even when it is clear who does what, with whom, and why. This “feeling of alienation” in the viewer’s perception is what Guadagnino’s genius can be grasped in, and which compensates for our emerging sense of absence due to the plot management.

One of the most important components of the “pleasant feeling of strangeness” is music. What, when and how he speaks is absolutely unusual and surprising, almost grotesque. The disco beats indicate that there is no room for personal drama in the life of an athlete, you have to push, spin, and smile. At least as effective are the moments when church choirs sing, while what happens on the screen is anything but grand. The pathos of the chorus comes when the characters indulge their animal instincts, and this contradiction makes such scenes extremely effective.

Overall, it is a film that can be interpreted from an artistic point of view, but often chooses a more commercial path Challengerswhich, in light of this, will start with good chances at the various award ceremonies, especially its cast of actors, who make it worth watching in the first place.

Challengers can be seen in Hungarian cinemas from April 25.

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