Everything is tennis. In “Challengers,” time is a tennis ball — served, then returned. The film begins in the present, where Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zieg (Josh O’Connor) fight for every point in a tennis match. Former tennis star Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) sits court-side, directly in line with the net. Everyone else’s heads turn in unison. Left, right, left. They follow the ball, but Tashi looks straight ahead. The stakes are high, but the audience does not know who she is rooting for.
The film cuts back 13 years. Art and Patrick are best friends and tennis partners. When they are both enamored by rising tennis player Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), each boy is handed a racket, and a net is strung up between them. Their relationships are now a game, and they are competing with each other.
“That’s your problem,” Tashi tells Patrick. “You always think you’ve won before the match is over.” “Are we talking about tennis?” he asks. “We’re always talking about tennis.”
This is not a love triangle. It is a square, where tennis competes for their time, focus, and bodies as much as they compete for each others. In a Los Angeles press conference, Zendaya described Tashi as “a character I had never read before, and she scared the [s—-] out of me.” Tashi is intense and drives others with her unerring ambition.
When Tashi has a career-ending injury, she becomes a coach for other players and entangles herself in the middle again. Art has become a famous tennis player who has fallen out of love with his craft and is willing to throw it all away, while Patrick is a washed-up unknown with nothing to lose. Their final match is a conflict that stretches from the first time they met up until this point. This point will decide their future.
Screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes found his inspiration for the film during a controversial call about illegal sideline coaching in the U.S. Open. Coaches are not allowed to talk to players during the match, which struck Kuritzkes as an “intensely cinematic situation, where you’re all alone on your side of the court. There’s one other person in this massive tennis stadium who cares as much about what happens to you as you do … but you can’t talk to them.”
In “Challengers,” conversations happen between the coach and player with only their eyes. A lack of sound calls attention to the thick tension pulling characters toward each other and creating conflict within. With no warning, this balance is suddenly interrupted by blaring electronic synth music. The soundtrack pounds across the frame, charging each game with crackling energy. Bass pumps them into action like a heartbeat, steadying them in anticipation of the serve. This music plays when characters enter a mental space of competition, which includes biting arguments, moments of critical decision, and intense tennis matches.
Director Luca Guadagnino’s editing also presents the plot as a twisting game. Cuts from the present to the past are as abrupt as a tennis ball thwacking against racket strings. The story returns again and again to the present match, but the interstitial scenes bounce through moments in time frenetically, giving the audience what they need to know in the moment and withholding the rest.
Tashi, Art, and Patrick hold their pasts close to their chests, never revealing more than they have to as the audience pieces together their webs of deceptions and what truths will be revealed next. The performances by Zendaya, Faist, and O’Connor are carefully controlled time bombs that explode with passion when the circumstances grow too taut to bear. Producer Amy Pascal said, “Luca [Guadagnino] pushed everybody, in a way, past their comfort zones … but what he got from everyone was so exquisite, so nuanced.”
Through the 13 years of their twisted love affair, Art, Patrick, and Tashi bring out the best and worst in each other. They are at their best when competing against each other, but they also betray each other in callous ways. These three players are partners first, breathing in desire and breathing out tennis. In them, anger and adrenaline and ambition converge into a primal lust for greatness. “The beauty of this film is that your mind will change,” Zendaya said about “Challengers.” Are any of the characters redeemable? And, more importantly, does this game allow a winner?
Grade: A
Director: Luca Guadagnino
Release Date: April 26, 2024
Image courtesy of Forbes
