‘Challengers’ plays a clever game, but blasts all emotions off the court

Zendaya stars as Tashi and Josh O’Connor as Patrick in 'Challengers', directed by Luca Guadagnino. Image: Niko Tavernise / Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures

By Jared Beukes

15 Jun 2024

Challengers, for all its intricacy and invention, and despite its flagrantly orgasmic climax, lacks the pleasure and largeness of life itself.

Challengers, the latest film by Luca Gaudagnino, is packaged and gift-wrapped as a nigh-literal wet dream for any connoisseur of arthouse movies. It partners highly accomplished, dazzling technical craft with a plot woven so tightly it sucks out the story, and characters defined so precisely they smother any personality.

The plot, as Noelle Adams explained in her Daily Maverick review, is set in the world of professional tennis. Art (played by Mike Faist) is a Grand Slam winner, who’s off his game at the moment. His wife and coach, Tashi (Zendaya), hoping to build up his confidence by entering him into lower-profile matches he’s likely to win, brings him to a Challenger event in New York, where he faces off in the final against the down-and-out challenger Patrick (Josh O’Connor).

The tournament final, set in 2019, frames a complex array of flashbacks, where Art and Patrick are shown to previously have been close friends, who won the US Open junior doubles in 2006. Both are smitten immediately and irreparably when they first lay eyes on Tashi, then a rising college star.

Zendaya stars as Tashi and Josh O’Connor as Patrick in 'Challengers', directed by Luca Guadagnino. Image: Niko Tavernise / Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures

Both court her, one makes the conquest, they later fall out, the other swoops in, an injury ends a dream, the two friends separate, romance is traded with careers, and the wrung-heart triangle grows more tangled and thorny over the years.

The narrative structure is clever and adroit, rather than revelatory or moving. Past episodes dovetail neatly with later ones, and unfold just to the point where they divulge enough information to keep the plot in motion.

Sharp retorts, fast cutting and a pounding techno score cut short encounters, actions and conversations before they overflow the script’s pointed designs. No scene risks spilling out into scruffier, more opaque and more dangerous emotional frankness.

One exemplary truncation is the internet-famous scene of Art and Patrick’s first erotic engagement with Tashi. She kisses one guy, then the other, and then, as they both kiss her, their lips meet, and she pulls away, to leave the two guys kissing each other. It’s a gender-role swap (one of many in the movie) for a classic foreplay scene, where a man enjoys watching two women make out.

But, when she cuts it short and leaves after promising to give her phone number to whoever beats the other in their singles match the next day, the movie cuts the erotic experience short too. It titillates, without reflecting anyone’s deeper emotional reverberations from the moment.

What did it mean to Art and Patrick? Did they enjoy it for their own sake, or only to appease Tashi? Is one of them more attracted to the other? Hints are dropped throughout the movie, and a homoerotic bond is suggested brazenly in several meme-worthy moments, but Challengers doesn’t bother to convey any of what Art and Patrick may actually be feeling about each other.

The script’s taut control extends to Gaudagnino’s direction.

He mixes apparently mismatched visual styles and filmmaking devices boldly and appealingly, and includes a number of memorably creative shots, especially ones that take place on the court. He even includes a deft allusion to Hitchock’s Strangers on a Train with his focus on an unmoving head among a crowd of tennis spectators.

But the direction is ostentatious, not evocative.

It niftily aligns the movie’s visual dimension with the script’s metaphor between tennis and relationships, but it doesn’t bring up the emotions boiling beneath the surface – it doesn’t suggest the intangibles of experience in sights and sounds.

As an aside, from someone who enjoys watching tennis, Gaudagnino’s filming didn’t feel very evocative of the movement and flow of a tennis match either. It is no surprise then, to read that he doesn’t watch tennis himself.

As Challengers ended, this writer was reminded – as a negative mirror image – of the love triangle in Terrence Malick’s movie Song to Song, from 2017.

There, the plot moved linearly, but Malick’s accomplishment is anything but conventional. Rooney Mara, Ryan Gosling and Michael Fassbender also play a freewheeling trio with strong career drives, in this case in the music industry. Similarly, it’s a story of relationships, ambition and pain.

Their pursuits integrate with their whole lives; their actions and their very beings rise up from a protean well, and spring into tender and volatile emotion. Superficial sex acts give way to exquisitely imagined and enacted love lives; entanglements spiral out and mesh with the wider world around them. Challengers, for all its intricacy and invention, and despite its flagrantly orgasmic climax, lacks the pleasure and largeness of life itself. DM

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