Review - Challengers
If tennis matches happened inside a rave, I would imagine this is what it would feel like (fun!)
Toxic love stories with queer tinges seem to be a big trend for the first few months of 2024. Drive-Away Dolls was a decent example of this type of story with the zaniness identifiable with the Coen brothers (despite only being made by one of them) and making more sense than last year’s Bottoms (a bad film in my opinion). Likewise, Love Lies Bleeding also came out this year, and was very interesting in terms of style but completely fell apart in its third act.
Here, the queerness lies more under the surface and is framed through a fated tennis match and three star-making performances. Let’s see how this film ages, but so far, it’s the most fun I’ve had in a movie theater since Barbenheimer last year. Not the best, but a lot of fun.
Ball in the Racket’s Neck: Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers
Production from the United States. Released in 2024.
Luca Guadagnino is a director of varied taste. His style varies from quiet and swooning romances to explicit body horror, but the one element that is always present in his filmography is a deep sensuality that is easy to perceive but hard to describe. He loves to use motifs and metaphors for desire, from the peach in Call Me By Your Name, cannibalism in Bones and All to even modern dance and the dynamic of student and teacher in his 2018 remake of Suspiria. All of these elements are definitely lacking in subtlety, which extends to how he chooses to tell his stories, and while that holds him back from being a truly great filmmaker, he makes up for it through sheer entertainment. It’s very hard to pull off the tonal somersaults and heavily stylized pans, zooms and music cues with as much seriousness and at the same time comedic irony as he does, and it is no exception with his 2024 feature Challengers.
The film is framed through the final game of a Challenger tournament, where Patrick Zweig, a has been played by Josh O’Connor, and Art Donaldson, an ultra famous tennis champion played by Mike Faist, face off with Tashi, played by Zendaya, looking in the middle. Throughout the film, screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes seems to make the argument that playing tennis is very much like a romantic relationship, one where the both players have to be in sync about passing each other the ball to continue playing, and where it is impossible for just one person to play by themselves. Both Art and Patrick have history with Tashi and seem to be, on the surface, endlessly competing for her affections. However, Guadagnino interprets the text with a more queer lens, and makes the entire experience a subtextual exploration of the love between Patrick and Art.
As the game progresses, the film flashes back to multiple points in these three characters’ lives, from 13 years ago when both Art and Patrick met Tashi and she was just getting started as a tennis prodigy, to some years later as their relationships morphed, to the present day where Art and Tashi essentially created a tennis empire, with him as the face and her as the mastermind of the operation. Tashi is such a fascinating character because her sheer ambition and obsessive dedication to the sport could make her seem one note -and to some extent she is-, but Zendaya sells every bit of her deeply pragmatic yet self-destructive behavior. She wants, above all, some good tennis, and will stop at nothing, even maybe ruin relationships, in the name of what she wants for the sport which became her whole life.
Patrick and Art are another story. While she sees everything as a means for tennis, they see tennis as a way to get to her. Patrick is privileged and arrogant, while Art is quieter, more considerate and completely submissive to both Patrick and Tashi, and resorts to other ways to get to both. As for how they feel for each other, Challengers never spells it out directly, but you would be blind if you miss how they consume phallic objects while around each other, like a churro or a banana, and how Guadagnino specifically puts the camera in certain places to signal this behavior, like Patrick grabbing Art’s leg in one of Tashi’s games, how their beds are essentially joined together in the hotel they stayed in when they were young, their embrace as one of their games ended, and even one foot pulling a chair towards him so that they stay close.
While they spend the entire film pining for Tashi, the relationship in play is between them. She may be the central figure of the film, but at its core, Challengers explores the relationship between Art and Patrick on and off the court. Both seem to be sexually fluid, and again Guadagnino’s inserts do too much to signal at their queerness, but Kuritzkes’ script is smart enough to avoid the film becoming too obvious -despite Luca’s many attempts otherwise-.
Since the film takes its time to switch between the three characters’ perspectives, it only makes sense for the editing to magnify the switches and exaggerate a bit more to feel on par with Challengers’ energy. Editor Marco Costa cuts cuts constantly but intentionally to keep the energy going and knows enough when to put some characters in center stage when certain flashbacks happen. What mixes me the most, however, is in the end when he and cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom use POV shots of the tennis rackets and the ball to heighten the energy of the central tennis match, but heavily rely on slow motion shots of the characters to prolong the scene.
Mukdeeprom, who is a well known of Thai master Apichatpong Weerasethakul [Tropical Malady (2004), Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2011), Memoria (2021)] is at his best when the films he works in move at a deliberately slow pace. Yet, he never seems to use slow motion shots, but rather works with Weerasethakul to keep the movement within the frame slow. Here, he embraces the zaniness of the film’s style, and it works for the most part with his creativity as a plus, but that whole presentation felt a bit off at the end.
Another much talked about aspect of the film is the original score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Both won their first Oscar thirteen years ago for their work in The Social Network, and it was revolutionary at the time because it was a mainly electronic score that still managed to cut deep into the main character’s psyche, one where the aggressive yet quiet electronics signaled at a young man angry with the world while lacking to emotional intelligence to identify his own responsibility for it. Here, Reznor and Ross keep the electronics but go full rave, with music that is by all means catchy and which I will continue listening to in the coming days. As it matches the energy that Guadagnino wants the film to have, sometimes it is so aggressive that it makes the more dramatic scenes seem comical by contrast. It made me think like I was watching the AI Balenciaga videos that went viral a few months ago. Maybe it was their intention to make these scenes a little more self-aware, but the film’s overreliance on the booming score left me a bit cold, despite mostly working.
For what it is, Challengers is a fun romp that uses a complex structure to tell an entertaining story about how love and tennis are basically the same thing, and that obsession leads to abuse of power for those who know how to wield it for other people. Zendaya is a star and carries the film towards this central idea as Tashi’s own obsessions take hold of her, but it is O’Connor and Faist who shine brightest as the film’s Trojan horse is their own love story, one that they maybe are too afraid to recognize, but know deep down -as much as Tashi does- that it is more real than anything both ever had with her.