Challengers

Set in the world of tennis, “Challengers” begins with a match between Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), the former a successful but aging pro looking to regain his mojo, the latter talented but mercurial and clinging to the edge of the profession. The event is in New Rochelle, seventeen miles outside New York as an establishing shot shows, and presented as a kind of country club idyll, underlined in the chirping birds and Henry Purcell’s Sound the Trumpet as sung by the Toronto Children’s Chorus on the soundtrack. Then, the idyll is wrecked as Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s pulsing electronica score kicks the baroque music to the curb and the camera zooms in past the judge’s chair and across the court to find Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) in the crowd. The way she watches Art and Patrick, and the way they turn to watch her watching them, clues us into their prickly codependent relationship even before we learn the considerable backstory. True, “Challengers” is short on emotional and intellectual depth, often as glossy as a commercial during a tennis match which the frequently blatant product placement evokes. But there is a primal ferocity that sticks, nevertheless, brought home in the capping shot, as if director Luca Guadagnino made his movie in the spirit of a Serena, or a Seles, or a Sharapova shriek. 

Art and Patrick’s match provides the framework for “Challengers” as we do not merely flash all the way back to the beginning and then move forward to this showdown but skip around in time, days, months, and years, to see what led them here. One-time doubles partners, Art and Patrick’s friendship begin to fray when they fell under the spell of Tashi, an extraordinary rising star. Screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes has said he was inspired by the contentious 2018 US Open Final between Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka, but watching the sequence in which Art and Patrick watch Tashi on the court took me back further, to the fraught days of Anna Kournikova when sex appeal and on-court skill seemed to blur into something indistinguishable.

That sequence, in which Art and Patrick first watch Tashi obliterate an opponent, and then meet her afterwards at a party, and then invite her back to their motel room, are funnier, really, than sexy, framing Faist and O’Connor by frequently placing them in the same shot with his sort of overcome slack-jawed expression renders them as two fluffy-headed boys bobbing in her wake. Physically, these scenes are attuned to Art and Patrick specifically as that, boys, clueless and hapless horndogs, and Zendaya’s performance here is deft, demonstrating complete control over them without making it obvious to them that she’s in complete control. And when she summons to the two boys to bed, brings them in close to her and then presses their lips together, the way she leans back, satisfied, she is essentially pitting them against one another. It’s a competitive love triangle, in other words, and “Challengers” charts the progression of that semi-romantic back and forth.

It is a fantastic set-up, yet the resulting follow-through only manages to reproduce the scintillating nature of this sequence in fits and starts. It’s clear the structure intends to evoke the shifting nature of a tennis match, yet the rhythm of the match itself quite blatantly mimics where things stand in terms of the love triangle. It’s not so much that it counteracts the match’s own sense of tension as it denotes how the characters in “Challengers” have little agency. It’s just one more puzzle box narrative where rather than lives being lived on screen, pieces are being snapped into place, meaning the tension results more from how the movie will put this all together than what are these people going to do, all of which also underlines the one dimensionality of the trio. Patrick as a rich guy cosplaying at being poor, Art wanting a real life outside of tennis, these attributes are reduced to lines of dialogue rather than being baked into the movie. In one scene, Patrick meets a woman (Hailey Gates) for a date merely as a cruel means to get a place to stay for the night. In her arresting anxiety, though, Gates threatens to puncture the movie’s three-person bubble. And because she does, just as the scene truly starts, it ends. If the piece doesn’t fit, it gets tossed.

On the other hand, a limited viewpoint and one dimensionality feel part and parcel of the characters themselves. There is one incredible moment, not long after we have seen Tashi and Art’s daughter and their daughter’s older nanny, when referencing his rehabilitating an injury, she expresses a wish that her own recovery from injury had been as easy as his, that she would have stabbed someone, a child or an older lady, to have his recovery. Zendaya’s voice here, casual, unthinking, earnest, virtually sideswipes you; whether she consciously realizes it or not, she may as well be speaking about her own daughter, or her own daughter’s nanny. Her daughter is an afterthought, not to the movie but to her. When this trio talks about tennis, they’re talking about life, and when they’re talking about life, they’re talking about tennis, and so practically every conversation and encounter between these friends and lovers in “Challengers” is filmed and played with the ferocity of a single point in a tennis match. “Life is bigger than the court,” retired tennis legend Roger Federer said in his recent viral Dartmouth commencement speech; “Challengers” says the opposite.