Tennis will tear us apart
Loving and hating a movie that’s only somewhat about tennis is a bit like loving two different baseball clubs. You revel sometimes in the emotional overflow, the ability to convey strong feelings in divergent directions … but then there’s the unease in your bowels at the fact that you, a person of positions, has found themselves unable to assume one. I am losing trust in my instincts and ultimately my judgment, at 30-something: in the idea that I will ever achieve resounding intellectual maturity and resolve — partly because, good grief, I should have seen Challengers coming.
I loved Challengers. It’s a Luca Guadagnino project. I’m proud to be one of the small handful of people that saw We Are Who We Are, in which a handful of military kids try to make sense of life and sexuality on a lush strategic base. Josh O’ Connor is on a run of good form, and is a talent I’ve been rooting for since he told that joke about the bear as Prince Charles on The Crown. I will tell anyone with five minutes to spare that Zendaya might be the best actress in the world, because she did remarkable things in more than one episode of Euphoria. Guadagnino, O’Connor, and Zendaya altogether in a seduction setpiece about tennis, that won’t take itself as remotely seriously as Woody Allen’s Matchpoint did, whilst still making one or two devastating but largely aesthetic observations about class? In which dimension of the universe exactly would I not say, “Yes, please, sign me the fuck up!” — ?
I hated Challengers. There is maybe one dimension, but precedence shows I can be negotiated with … Before I made the short trip across town to the Kino International I got a strange feeling in my stomach. I was way too excited about a great concept with a bad trailer, which (if I were in general more lucid, more mature) I would have identified from the get-go. What if Challengers turned out to be too much ‘sex’, not enough tennis, and what if it went ahead and leaned into the kitsch of laying ‘Man-Eater’ by Nelly Furtado (UGH) over a visualisation of the age-old query, Is it really bros before —
I loved Challengers. Grassroots tennis, or somewhereabouts, is the perfect machine in which to insert childhood friendship and prompt its compromise by way of bodies — and not just any bodies: artful ones that glide and sway and crunch across courts, which in an ideal production should lace every serve and return with an illicit erotic potency. “Tennis,” says Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), a prodigy on her way up, “is like a relationship.” She says this to the young gents that have taken a fancy to her, on a beach, snacking on cigarettes, after besting a peer she calls racist. The sequence of the match itself is wasted a little bit, its focus on Tashi’s cold discipline serving the wider plot but not this tidy metaphor — which pinpoints the moments tennis is most entrancing for observers like me, and speculates neatly as to the secret place players go even if they despise each other.
Tennis is the reason Patrick (O’Connor) and Art (an honestly Indian Wells-ready Mike Faist) love each other like brothers. Its the primary reason they can’t stop staring at Tashi, even when she doesn’t have a racket in her hands.
I hated Challengers. Okay, I found it: I think the dimension in which I have a problem with leaning into class aesthetics is one in which the material fails to a) venture a meaningful apology to the working class, by b) maintaining a level of comedic balance, and then c) asserting that it actually has with an ending so ridiculous that if Guadagnino’s winking at us I’d wager he now needs eye surgery.
Challengers drifts back and forth across time to show us who (and how and when) Tashi decides to coach after her career is cut short by a brutal injury. These timelines allow us to arrive at our own conclusions about the characters’ relationships to wealth, aside from the inherent privilege in getting to romance the ranks of youth tennis. Tashi knows what it’s like to have to strive maybe because she’s half-black, Patrick seems to have lost a lot of access in the main through-line, perhaps voluntarily, and Art could always trade around his dad’s stock options if he needs a plan B. It’s low-key irritating (lols, please, I beg) that when Tashi’s knee buckles, Art and Patrick’s bond does the same completely. The tone of the movie darkens swiftly, which means Guadagnino’s time jumps are now really only serving superficial gods.
I hate that in this very specific world wealth and its fluctuation are things the filmmakers presume can just keep accounting for themselves. This hunch deprives Art of real depth when he appears to decide he’s past competing anymore, and it feels cheap and patronising when it’s used to make the prospect of sex more attractive. In Guadagnino’s hands intimacy is normally a tender and magical thing, an uncertain act of escape from the relative safety of both personal and societal expectation — here, more than once, it feels like an Instagram Story.
I loved Challengers. Guadagnino does really cool things with non-verbal ingredients, and challenges himself with a thundering electronic score put together by Trent Reznor. Sometimes bass thumps right over really important conversations about why this person or that is a coward or an asshole. The incessant time-hops are, at first, a nifty way to illustrate how we arrive at Challengers’ defining contest. Even though it doesn’t always nail the assignment, or much bother to actually, the movie understands the minutiae of what separates prospects from sure things in tennis and in love. Pure callousness, every now and then.
I hated Challengers. I have never rolled my eyes so far around the world as I did watching this movie’s third act. It spends an hour or so doing really interesting, slightly unpredictable things, and then is comfortable defaulting around familiar themes of betrayal; with coarse, overly compact dialogue, defiantly high fashion, and worsening tennis sequences. The moments its characters choose to be tasteless are supposed to fell the trees of the rich and fabulous, assure us we’re not that far apart when it comes to fucking up — but to be brutally honest, I have no real use for this fairy tale.
