Challengers : what makes tennis challenging?

2012, Murray vs Djokovic in the US Open Final, I liked tennis at that point and I was familiar enough with the sport to understand its rules, the match ended after 4 hours 54 minutes, I’ve never seen anything like that in my life when it comes to sports, nearly 5 hours of nonstop back-and-forth between two athletes, unlike football’s 11v11 or basketball’s 5v5, if you’re rooting for someone then you’re rooting for them and them only, unless we’re talking doubles tennis which is still intimate in its own regard, but the point is that there are no teams, where various parts can be changed but the entity remains still, you root for the individual in their match against a singular opponent, it’s a quite confrontational sport so to speak, it’s a conversation, and the perfect vehicle for personal stakes in a sports movie.

I’m still quite shocked that tennis movies have never been a thing, and not just that, just having sports films where the main narrative isn’t a rags to riches weepie, it’s probably because tennis has always been “the boring sport”, the ball goes here and then it goes there for quite some time, but tennis is all about that back-and-forth, it’s one story against the other, and while these stories maybe aren’t that captivating in the real world of tennis, in a setting where stories are supposed to captivate (i.e. movies) and with it being as intimate as it is in Challengers, you can’t help but feel excited about tennis.

The marketing campaign for this movie tried as hard as it could to not focus on the tennis aspect of this film, and if any particular image attached to this movie reached your device prior to its release, you probably know what the campaign focused on, and that was the right call, it’s not like the movie baited anyone into watching a sports film with the love triangle being a drawing point, as I said before, tennis is just a vehicle to a story highlighting the disastrous consequences of obsession and jealousy when individuals act without considering the ramifications of their actions. The story starts with two friends, Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), who partake in doubles tennis and do quite a good job at it, on the other side we have Tashi (Zendaya), the next big thing in women’s tennis, Art and Patrick, as any two teenage boys will do, are now trying to seduce her in this competitive manner that has them stepping on each other’s toes to see who eventually scores, which needless to say, is the first extension of sports logic into this love triangle, Tashi ends up manipulating them with this Kubrickian stare on her face into butting heads with each other by the end of their first encounter, both figuratively and literally, and we get our first glimpse at the peculiar dynamic of this trio and what each character has to offer.

The film is presented in a non-linear narrative, which is usually thought of as disorienting, but in this one, the non-linear structure is there to guide us through the movie, which is more akin to a puzzle that keeps getting more pieces as we obtain more context, it all revolves around one match, it is the second match between the flourishing Art who is now married and coached by Tashi who’s looking to retrieve his confidence, and Patrick who is not nearly as successful despite his natural gifts, he seems to take his talent for granted and refuses to put in as much effort to better himself as his challenger, but Art’s competitive nature works both ways, he is a great tennis player but he’s lost in Tashi’s desire to control, Tashi is retired due to a knee injury and she resorts to coaching, and this injury is what initially exposed the cover that was above this boiling pot of the three characters’ motivations.

One of the first manifestations of Tashi’s intense desire for competition is shown when she says that the winner of the first Art v. Patrick will get her phone number, and the two high schooler friends buy it immediately, oblivious to the fact that this can and will tarnish their friendship and that if anything, Tashi enjoys pitting them against each other. As we mentioned earlier, Patrick is the more talented one and the winner of both the tournament and Tashi’s number, despite being the less motivated one. The relationship didn't work out in the end, Tashi thought that selecting the superior player would make him more receptive to being molded into a great player, but Patrick’s aloofness and unwillingness to let tennis bounce into his personal life made things more difficult, he never cared about tennis or Tashi as much as Art did, and Art is competitive enough to snatch her away from him using every tactic in the book, and he eventually does at some point after Tashi’s career-ending injury culminating in her retirement and breakup with Patrick, but is Art the one in control now?

Power dynamics in relationships are not the easiest thing to explore, add a third part and it’s infinitely more difficult, Tashi/Art worked for quite some time due to the mutual understanding that he works hard so he can be the stand-in for her wasted career, and that she coaches him well so she could pull the best out of him, but what happens when one side loses the drive to maintain that dynamic? When Art eventually loses his passion for the game, which conveniently occurs as he secures her now that Patrick is out of the picture, then we start seeing who yields the power, and it’s the person who can get the other to act in the service of their goals, Art still loves her but that love doesn’t bleed into his in-game results as it did before because there is no reason to do so, so Tashi threatens to leave him if he loses, after all these years she’s still just a tennis enthusiast and Patrick remains the more talented player, as tennis seeps into Tashi’s psyche enough to see her ricochetting from one end to the other, she’s willingly being the ball and the metaphor is further enriched by an entire sequence from the ball’s POV, amongst many instances of inventive camera work in this film.

The final scene had us witness the climax of Donaldson vs Zweig, after taking its time with the buildup now comes the resolution, enhanced by Guadagnino’s camera with Reznor and Ross’ eclectic score, the film’s bottled rage is eventually discharged as the match crescendos into insanity in this Whiplash-esque fashion, the tennis and the sex in this movie are almost interchangeable and this scene further pushes that narrative, as the line between the two aspects keeps getting blurrier, one might start to lose track of which of the two they’re talking about at any given moment, but that's where the brilliance of Justin Kuritzkes' script lies, love is treated as a sport, and maybe the fact that they’re athletes is what allows them to see romance as a competition, is it the tennis that sculpted this unorthodox view of love, or vice versa? The movie never answers that question conclusively, as it’s not its job in the first place, but what the film suggests by the end is that love is congenitally chaotic, which is constantly reflected through its cinematic language, people make plenty of wrong decisions because of love, and unlike tennis, it has no rules set in stone, we collectively change its guidelines all the time as they end up changing us too, but we want it anyway, and what our leads seem to understand in the final minutes is that their relationship will always be flawed and messy, but for all its flaws, it was the only thing that managed to feed their passion for the sport.

Taha Louafi