FILM
TENNIS, ANYONE? Love-triangle sports drama ‘Challengers’ serves sexy fun BY MICHAEL J. CASEY
W
ithin every game, there’s a second game playing out inside the first. We can’t always see it, but it’s often much more significant than the one we’re watching. This is true regardless of your level of involvement with any given sport, but let’s say you’re the type who skips the regular season and the playoffs and only tunes into the finals. All you see are players competing for a trophy and nothing more. What you do not see — cannot see — are the players’ pasts, individually and collectively: the years spent in juniors, on the college circuit, in qualifying matches and minor tournaments across the globe and throughout the calendar. You do not see the drama that unfolds in the locker rooms, the times they’ve shared cramped hotel rooms on tour and sat next to each other on the bus. All you see is a ball traveling back and forth. All they see is a lifetime. Challengers, the latest from director Luca Guadagnino, has so much fun with that lifetime that there’s a good chance you’ll read far too much into the next tennis match after watching this movie. The story is framed by a Challenger Tour final in New Rochelle, New York — which isn’t geographically far from
BOULDER WEEKLY
are Art and Patrick. Winning Flushing, Queens, where the Left to right: Mike a tennis match isn’t just U.S. Open takes place, but Faist, Zendaya and about putting the ball past feels metaphorically out of Josh O’Connor your opponent. It’s about reach — with Art Donaldson in Challengers. taking them off their line, (Mike Faist) and Patrick Courtesy: Amazon / pulling them from the spot Zweig (Josh O’Connor) tradMGM Studios they want to be and making ing points and spraying them play the game you want to play. sweat in the warm summer sun. For There’s an art form to manipulation, everyone in the crowd, it’s one hell of and these three are artists. a match, one that tips back and forth What a nifty little construction in favor of the other. But only one perChallengers employs: Three sets to a son in the crowd knows what’s really match, three acts to a story, three happening here: Tashi Donaldson (Zendaya), Art’s wife and Patrick’s for- players in this one. In 2019, Art is the tennis prodigy who’s made good, won mer lover. three of the four majors and is getting From this meeting in 2019 New ready to retire once he completes the Rochelle, Guadagnino and writer career slam. Patrick might be the betJustin Kuritzkes bounce freely in chroter player, but he never quite figured nology from now to 13 years prior, to out how to play the greater game and seven months later, to minutes before, has been languishing in smaller tourto three weeks ago. From New naments with low payouts and little Rochelle to Atlanta to Stanford — the glory. Tashi was the best of the trio, setting and era may change, but the but an injury sidelined her playing dynamic does not. Art and Patrick are career and forced her to switch to close, and Tashi is the woman who comes between them. You’ve probably coaching. Recounting it like that makes it all seen that story before: two men who sound so standard. Challengers is not. can only love and hate each other Guadagnino and Kuritzkes giddily toy through the woman who shares their with convention while encouraging a lives. sexual current to charge the narrative. But here, Tashi is more instigator than connector, a woman with her own Then there are the matches, captured by cinematographer Sayombhu desires and disappointments to naviMukdeeprom, sometimes from above, gate. She’s manipulative, sure, but so
sometimes from the player’s point of view — herky-jerky movements full of energy — and sometimes from the ball’s perspective as it goes hurtling back and forth, smashing into rackets and crashing into nets. The editing from Marco Costa is a master class of eye lines and triangulation, and the score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is one of the few from the duo that doesn’t just ping ethereally in the background but drives the characters with a loud, pulsating force. Everything here feels calibrated for fun. If there is a misstep, it is in Challengers’s climatic finish, where streams of sweat pour off Art and Patrick in seductive slow motion as if Gudaginino still wants to delay gratification after two hours of basking in the beauty of these young and fit bodies, their sensual pull to one another and their constant jockeying to be on top. That might have worked in a more cloistered movie, but here, it just feels like overkill — especially after that scene between Art and Patrick in the sauna.
ON SCREEN:
Challengers opens in theaters April 26.
APRIL 18, 2024
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