Challengers: All’s Fair In 15-Love and War

By Chris Knight

Rating: A-

Challengers is four tennis balls in a three-ball tube.

The slow motion? The dance/trance/club mix soundtrack? The sexual tension? The fractured chronology? The tennis-as-a-metaphor-for-sex dialogue? The unexpected sex-as-a-metaphor-for-tennis dialogue?

The (I hope to God for the sake of the cinematographer) CG tennis balls that seem to fly right out of the screen and into your lap? The Oscar-qualifying running time of two hours and ten minutes? The dripping sweat? A framing technique I’m suddenly going to call Zenday-ass? And did we mention the sexual tension?

It’s all freakin’ fantastic, a real all-night rave of a movie. But could we maybe just dial the whole thing down just a smidgeon? Could Challengers perhaps have given merely 100 per cent instead of 110? I left the screening feeling like Oliver Twist after an all-you-can-eat buffet. Please, sir, I want a bit less.

The story, for all its bombast and excess, is simple. Art and Patrick (Mike Faist, Josh O’Connor) are best buds and tennis wizards. They’ve been bunkmates since before puberty and played the sport of kings for almost as long.

Though as we see in the film’s opening scenes, set in 2019, their fortunes have diverged somewhat. Art is married to Tashi (Zendaya), who is also mother to his child and coach to his career, which is going well enough that they can stay in swanky hotels while on the road.

Patrick can’t scrape together enough money for the most modest of flophouses and ends up sleeping in his car before the low-level tournament he’s attending. (Later in the film we see him browsing Tinder — on a cracked iPhone no less — as a low-cost substitute for AirBnB.)

Director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name, Bones and All) then winds the action back some 13 years, to when the two young men first met (and clearly fell for) Tashi. “Who couldn’t love her?” one of them remarks to the other, who plays down his current relationship, not wanting to ruin his chances with her.

Tashi counters that she’s no homewrecker, though between the three of them, there’s not much emotional real estate still standing by the film’s end.

In the years that follow — visited out of order just a little more than is necessary — both men carry a torch for Tashi, while she fans the flames. For a time, she and Patrick are an item, until an injury on the court allows Art to swoop in as her saviour and protector. But there are moments over the years where it’s clear she’s never quite moved on.

And everyone is so fiercely competitive! In one unforgettable scene, Tashi lets out what sounds like a howl of despair at winning a match, apparently upset that it wasn’t more difficult. And the two male leads are forever posturing, flexing, grinning like angry chimpanzees. We don’t ever see their below-the-waist offerings, but tennis racquets make for a lovely Freudian stand-in.

Don’t believe me? Consider this pillow talk from Tashi: “You always think you’ve won before the match is over.” That throws Patrick off his game, and he asks: “Are we talking about tennis?” Her inscrutable reply: “I’m always talking about tennis.”

The screenplay, by playwright and novelist Justin Kuritzkes, has great fun playing three-body-problem with its stars, nicely contrasting the volleys of the heart with the relative simplicity of the game they play. Again, I assume the perfect tennis ball trajectories were added in post, but the actors capture the balletic movements of the best players, and their grunts of exertion at every shot were played up by the soundtrack to the level of a panting steam engine.

And yet. I’d have loved Challengers more if it gave me less to enjoy.

Guadagnino has been busy of late. Since 2017 he’s made five films (and that with a pandemic in the middle) not to mention eight episodes of TV’s We Are Who We Are, short films and music videos, including for his Challengers composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.

He doesn’t have anything to prove. He could have paced himself in this outing. If you wear yourself too early in the game, you’ll never finish the set, let alone the match.

Challengers. Directed by Luca Guadagnino. Starring Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Josh O’Connor. In theatres April 26.