Challengers
It’s impossible to get a good grip on “Challengers” because of its flashing, time hopping style. It’s like trying to hold water with your hands cupped together: every time you think you’ve got it, another bit slips through your fingers. Sometimes, this is frustrating. I have questions! Why did Tashi do the thing she did? What exactly drives Patrick? But mostly I’m fine with it. The film may not be the most emotionally satisfying movie ever made but it’s so dazzling in its non-tennis showpieces that I don’t care.
The film stars Zendaya as Tashi, a former tennis pro whose career ends after an injury and who takes up management for her husband Art (Mike Faist). Art is a nice guy who has achieved great things in the world of men’s tennis thanks to his wife’s guidance and loyalty but he’s having an existential crisis when we meet him. Hoping that he’ll remember what drove him when they met, Tashi suggests that he play in a low-level championship match.
But there’s something else going on here, some secret agenda whose motivations and machinations we’re never quite let in on one of the players expected at the match is Patrick (Josh O’Connor), a scruffy hustler who used to be Art’s best friend until Tashi came between them like actually came between them; there is another lengthy flashback scene where she visits their shared motel room during a tournament and makes out with both of them until they start making out with each other while she watches.
And why? A good question! The film lets us peer into her psychology but never enough to draw any firm conclusions about her emotional insides. Or about Patrick’s either once Art finds his roots in this tournament, early on he realizes that Tashi is there for him too, the sexual energy between them remains strong, much stronger and more obvious than what flows between Tashi and Art. And do you know what? We don’t know! Their connection is a little more primal than cerebral. Meanwhile, what drives Art? Mostly goodness. He’s a good person who wants things to work out for the best. You can tell he knows something’s up with Patrick and Tashi. But he has decided to be grateful for having won this relationship tournament officially, and trusts his wife’s love and loyalty enough to let it ride.
What a situation! It’s like Justin Kuritzkes wrote an equation only half of which we’re given in order to avoid spoiling us with too many solutions. I love the fact that “Challengers” refuses to explain itself while also being very eager to please us with Marco Costa’s editing choices the film stays nimble even when it starts tripping over its own plot logic.
You’ve seen movies like “Challengers” before. There’s a lively cinematic subgenre that deconstructs the rise and fall of a relationship by jumping around in time two excellent examples are “Blue Valentine” and “Two for the Road” and this movie does that with panache, and also many scenes of athletic competition that are so spectacularly blocked, framed, and edited together they feel like a tennis fan’s answer to a boxing picture. (Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor’s score is insistent and relentless and loud, the techno inflected answer to a full studio orchestra score in an old Hollywood melodrama.)
Is “Challengers” too ambitious for its own good? Or just enough? Maybe less than meets the eye, as the late great Village Voice critic Andrew Sarris would have put it? Probably all of those things. It gets sucked into the vortex of its own narrative and technical ambitions in the final stretch. And there might be too many clever transitions from one time period to another, sometimes at moments when what’s onscreen is so engrossing that you’d rather see the movie continue immersing itself in this moment rather than cutting away to chase some other thing. And the 1970s American New Wave “What just happened and what does it mean?” ending feels unearned. It’s not pretentious so much as out of nowhere and wrong for what preceded it.
The pleasures of “Challengers” are visceral, intuitive, at times animalistic. Despite the intricate structure I don’t think it ever comes off as saying, “I am an art film, and I will take you into the hidden recesses of the human heart/mind/self/etc., etc., blah blah blah.” The tone is more like those great entertainments that starred Humphrey Bogart or Lauren Bacall from back in the day when every line seemed dirty because of how the actors said it.
Which is to say that the film is more Hollywood than Cannes, and not only is that perfectly fine, it’s exciting. Commercial cinema seems these days terrified of sex, and adult sexuality, and adulthood generally. Anything over a certain budget level seems to neuter itself by repeatedly worrying throughout the production process whether what’s happening on the screen might potentially cause even mild discomfort in a family with young children or between an older parent and the adult child who lives with them and has to sit beside them on the couch while watching TV. It’s a shame how the phrase “adult movie” has become associated almost exclusively with erotica/pornography because it also describes this kind of work that concerns itself with matters that children cannot understand because they’re children.
All three lead actors carry themselves like movie stars. Guadagnino and his game for anything cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (who shot two other Guadagnino films as well as several by Apichatpong Weerasethakul) shoot these performers as if they’re legends of both court and screen that they’re very lucky to have in the cast. It’s a treat to see three young contemporary actors nailing the understated flirty gravitas thing that stars of films for grownups used to do in earlier eras but nobody knows how to do now at this comparatively sexless moment in 21st century cinema.
Zendaya has that knowing alpha-queen insinuating blank-slate quality that used to emanate from many Julia Roberts roles in the ’90s and early ’00s.
She carries herself as though she has every right to be where she is, this feeling nailed by Tashi, who remains formidable even after an unlucky break takes professional tennis out of her hands as sport and leaves it with her as a business and media mastermind. The nice guy role of someone strong and true but maybe not tough enough to take what the other two characters are about to put him through is played with exacting grace by Benjamin H. Faist. O’Connor’s slightly open mouth, dark features, unshaven sweatiness and rumpled stains make him the 21st-century answer to a ’70s movie star like Elliott Gould or Donald Sutherland somebody who has a smirking countercultural edge and he has a dangerously unstable charisma that is just right for this picture.
The main-character perspective in “PVT Chat” is outside looking in. Even when the camerawork and editing dice up the story and rearrange meanings and facts, you never get inside the minds or hearts of these people. It’s not that kind of movie. You watch it like you watch the U.S. Open. Power dynamics are everything: Who’s up? Who’s down? Is there potential for comeback? It’s great sports filmmaking because it shows you how what happens in the arena is a stylized and distilled mirror of what’s happening elsewhere in these players’ lives. There are several moments where one of them faces another on the court, so to speak, and we draw breath because we know that one has a secret advantage over the other a trump card they’ve been carrying around for awhile, which they’re finally ready to play.
This movie doesn’t have a philosophical or understated moment anywhere in its running time, and seems not to care whether you think that’s a flaw; it’s “in the zone” in the way that an athlete is when they’re playing at their peak. It doesn’t just want to entertain. It wants to win.
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