What is love? – Challengers asks the Big Question, and its characters seem to be totally wrong about the answer. Which, fortunately, the film does not push into our picture either. On the other hand, it shows quite well what becomes of us if we perceive life (and love) like a tennis match. In short, there are only winners or losers.
Challengers is a romantic drama wrapped in a tennis movie, which contains only traces of love, and the biggest advantage of which is that it is far from being about two men competing for one woman.
Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick (Josh O’Connor) have been best friends since childhood and, by the way, are tennis players who compete (but not compete) in doubles and against each other. It seems that nothing and no one can stand between them. Until they meet Tashi (Zendaya), an 18-year-old promising tennis player who impresses young men with her game and beauty. The three meeting each other eventually turns into a romance between Tashi and Patrick that ends ugly, and a long-distance race between Tashi and Art that slowly turns from friendship into marriage and a coach-athlete relationship.
Although Tashi starts his professional career with high hopes, in a fatal match he sustains such a knee injury that he can say goodbye to the field – at least as a competitor. As Art’s coach, however, he remains just as ambitious. The two men meet again on the field 13 years after they first laid eyes on the woman. Whether they are competing for victory, for the coveted woman, or for each other – perhaps they themselves don’t know.
The director of Call Me by Your Name and Bones and All, Luca Guadagnino, is very good at mixing genres that seem incompatible at first. Bones infused the love story into horror, in Challengers into sport – in the film, the decade-long battle between the woman and the two men culminates in a single, all-decisive tennis match. The screenplay was written by Justin Kuritzkes, whose wife, Celine Song, almost won an Oscar last year with her first film, Past Lives, which also deals with the intertwining of the lives of three people.
In Challengers, the sexual tension pulsates in such a way that there is practically no sex scene in it. But who needs a sex scene when it becomes clear at the beginning of the film that
a good tennis match is practically like sex, and a good stroke equals an orgasm? We get enough of this and that.
In this matter, Kuritzkes does not leave much to chance. When they first meet, Tashi elaborates on how tennis is really like a relationship, explaining to Art and Patrick, who stare at her with their mouths open, that she only played real tennis with her opponent for 15 minutes that day while they hit each other “like they were in love “. Art also notes that Tashi let out a loud scream at the winning shot, and she smiles at him tellingly. At this point, both men’s fates were sealed.
Although Zendaya can’t complain either, it’s clear that the atmosphere between Faist and O’Connor glows the most (this may be due to Zendaya’s not very strong dubbing voice), and we can thank their pair for the strongest scenes. Faist and O’Connor can make the audience laugh or sweat simply by looking at something, someone or each other. Guadagnino makes good use of this.
It is interesting that Zendaya herself participated in the selection of the male protagonists as the film’s producer, and even recommended both of them for the role. Despite the fact that Josh O’Connor has mainly appeared in British TV series and films so far, he also made a name for himself overseas after playing the young Prince Charles in the series The Crown (for this role, he also received an Emmy Award in 2021) . Mike Faist, on the other hand, is primarily a stage actor who previously only appeared in low-budget, independent films and series.
The turning point for him was 2021’s West Side Story, in which he played Riff. Zendaya, on the other hand, noticed him not in this, but in the Broadway musical Dear Evan Hansen, which ran between 2016 and 2018. In the careers of both O’Connor and Faist, Challengers is the first major role they play in an American studio film, and if nothing else, finding the perfect Patrick and Art proves that Zendaya is also a producer in addition to acting, modeling and fashion dictation.
But after her two Emmy Award-winning lead roles in the HBO series Euphoria, as well as supporting roles in the Spider-Man franchise and the Dune films, this is Zendaya’s first lead role in a film (if you don’t count the film shot during the coronavirus pandemic and shown exclusively on Netflix two-person chamber drama, Malcolm & Marie).
Zendaya already proved in Dune that she is best at meaningful glances, and she maximizes this talent in Challengers, as well as the tired/tortured face sculpted to perfection in the role of the drug-addicted teenager in Euphoria, which here now serves a completely different purpose: to make us believe that that the still only 27-year-old actress is a 30-something wife, mother, world-class trainer, manager and businesswoman. We mostly believe it.
While Zendaya dominates the screen with her all-pervading gaze and O’Connor with her crazy-sexy-scary smile, Faist counterbalances them with her restrained and rarely explosive acting. However, in a significant part of the film, the main role is not played by them, but by the drops of sweat running down Art and Patrick’s bodies, the tennis balls bouncing back and forth, and the close-ups jumping between the faces of Tashi, Art and Patrick.
Challengers is really a tennis movie, and not the least, which is largely due to the fact that Guadagnino jumps back and forth between time planes and matches so that we don’t have a chance to get bored of any of them. And it doesn’t hurt that Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, who is working with the director not for the first time, uses almost every available camera angle for effect.
At one moment, we watch the game from the perspective of the bouncing ball, and at the next, from the player’s point of view, and then the camera follows what is happening on the field from a bird’s eye view or by moving with the gaze of the spectators sitting in the stands. Mukdeeprom sometimes does not shy away from jumping back and forth between points of view within a single scene, which can easily make you dizzy even sitting in the cinema seat.
The backbone of the film is the match when Art and Patrick face each other again towards the end of their professional careers. Art – in Patrick’s words – is a “steadily good” player who, under Tashi’s guidance, had a good career, but not an outstanding one. For example, he has never been able to win the US Open, and based on his current losing streak, it looks like he won’t. Which doesn’t seem to really bother him, but Tashi all the more.
That’s why she comes up with the idea that, as a little boost of self-confidence, Art should enter him in a tournament organized for lower-level players, where he can put himself back on track with a few easy wins. Patrick also comes to this competition, and although he has/had Art’s skills, his career was quite different, so he didn’t even come close to the results achieved by his former friend. On the other hand, they enter the field (again) as equal opponents, and the stakes are much higher than a simple victory. As the match is not only about tennis, but about… what? Yes, about sex.
Guadagnino doesn’t leave the understanding of this to chance either, the techno that blares during the tennis matches returns again and again during the dialogues between the three protagonists, which makes the viewer feel a little too much that the same dynamics are moving the strings here on the court and also in private life. And even though the soundtrack by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross gives the film a great background, sometimes the bass kicks in at moments when it absolutely crushes scenes that are absolutely functional even without musical accompaniment.
By the way, the creative director of Loewe and the designer of the JW Anderson fashion brand, Jonathan Anderson, was responsible for the film’s costumes. This is best seen in the t-shirt with the inscription “I told ya” (which plays a prominent role in the film), which is a John F. Kennedy Jr. https://twitter.com/Griffin_Funk/status/1555582343896698880/photo/1 top revision, and which already took on an independent life during the film’s press tour (there is an example of this here and here). As, of course, Zendaya’s selected sets. Because what a sacrilege it would be if the movie starring Zendaya didn’t bring tenniscore into fashion this summer.
Challengers is in cinemas from April 25.
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