I have to admit, I was not attracted to either the poster or the trailer for this film, so I only got around to seeing it now. Pleasant surprise! I found it so engaging that I offer here, if not exactly a review, my observations. This will always be better to read if you’ve seen it.
Tashi, an ambitious tennis player turned coach, has transformed her husband from a mediocre player into a world-class champion. To offset a recent losing streak, she makes him play a challenger event — close to the lowest level of tournament on the pro tour. Careful planning soon gets blown to hell when he finds himself standing across the net from the once-promising, now forty-something has-been Patrick, his childhood best friend and Tashi's high school boyfriend.
The opening image of Challengers (2024) is an overhead shot of an X formed by the tennis court center line and the net. X is a symbol of power1 , but also a symbol of transition, a crossing point or threshold between states, or one level of consciousness to another—it also happens to be the symbol of the Trinity. Here, we have an almighty power trio of elite tennis players whose intertwined stories spells out not success but failure, and on many levels. It’s the story of an unresolved, decade-long romantic triangle of the painful variety.
From the opening serve, we cut to sweaty grimaces in extreme close-up, our introduction to the film’s three main characters: Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), and Tashi Duncan (Zendaya).
Cinephiles might draw comparisons to The Dreamers, Bertolucci (2003) but I prefer to compare it to ‘Jules et Jim’, the 1962 film by François Truffaut. Tashi, like Catherine, is in firm control from the moment she knocks on the door. Challengers, thankfully, does not end in either attempted murder, or death by drowning, yet the discord, frustrated desire, and betrayal play out no less dramatically, and the film has a powerful if quirky resolution of its own.2
According to director Luca Guadagnino: “I needed to get this very, very visually amped up and really immersed for the audience to understand how much it meant for them not to win over the other, but to be back together, all of them."
This is really the alpha and omega of the film.
Foreshadowing
The story elegantly weaves in and out of the characters’ shared past, which gives context to their decision-making, but like a noose, it closes tighter and tighter around their necks as the present thread of the story evolves.
The film language of Challengers is rich in symbols and ingenious camera work. In one of the first flashback scenes of their shared high school experiences, a wise-beyond-her-years Tashi goes Socratic on her two gawping suitors to instructs them that “Tennis is a relationship.” Much of the plot hinges on this idea. When a serious accident puts an end to her own career, she and Art are married, and she coaches him. They become rich thanks to his winning match after match. However, it doesn’t really help their relationship much; for Tashi, it seems Art is only as good as his last win. So fifteen years later, Tashi says to a now tired, and a much demoralized Art, “What do we have to do to get you to play again?” You don’t want to know what she cruelly has in mind. This might be a quibble of mine against the film: reducing Tachi to the morally weak, emasculating wife trope.
Then there is Patrick.
She and Art both makes a lot of excluding Patrick from their lives, yet the irony is that ultimately he’s the one who, perhaps inadvertently, actually rules the three of them. I’m not sure people will see it this way, but in this very messy triangle, he is the biggest catalyst. His supposed low-life loser status makes no difference. Art, despite his skill with a racket, is a follower. First looking to Patrick for guidance, then Tashi, by the time the audience finds out about Atlanta, it’s clear that for her, it was always Patrick. We note that she does not throw away Patrick’s number when he pleads with her to coach him. Tashi, the teenage tennis titan, succumbs to her fate, and later, once again, to Patrick, who may or may not have ever even loved her.
Irony
Events taking place during their college days in Stanford create consequences for them that change their lives forever. Art actually orchestrates the break-up fight between Tashi and Patrick, which may or may not have contributed to Tashi’s state of mind on the day of her career-ending accident. She certainly seemed to think that, as she screams at him in the infirmary to GTFO. Art is dutifully at her side.
The second irony is that while the accident brings them together, the Tashi Art inherits from Patrick is damaged inside and out, and the last and most brutal irony is that Tashi would always have tried to dominate whoever she went with, even if she had not had the accident. Patrick would always have rebelled. Their fight scene in her college dorm room succinctly encapsulates the unworkable nature of their relationship, just as the frail, conditional nature of Tashi’s love for Art is laid bare in the unbearably sad hotel bedroom scene years later.
Symbols Signs and Symmetry
As well-crafted as the story and dialogue are, the film-making also deserves much appreciation. There are visual and aural signs that are clever storytellers, like the wave of heads turning left and right in avid attention, which frames Tashi’s unmoving head. We know she’s pondering the situation beyond the volleys on the court. The 80s, high energy synthpop (Trent Reznor!) ramps up whenever there is tension or excitement, while the boys’ choir comes in any time the inevitable pushes into the realm of the merely possible. Another great use of visual storytelling is the billboard of the celebrity couple looking on as Tashi commits her second infidelity with Patrick. Best of all I think, is the catalog of meanings Josh O’Connor can give to a smile. It’s as if, while preparing the character, he set himself a challenge to see how many he could come up with.3
Zendaya, on the other hand, spends most of her time scowling. In a bit of hyperdiegesis, it’s implied that Art has had an accident at some point, which is why his performance is so subpar. With their respective injuries, there is a symmetry at play, one that is being subverted, so Art’s winning represents a stake way much bigger than the Challenger competition. Tashi has risen above her accident, and she expects Art to follow suit. She cannot bear for Art to lose. Only, he is at the end of his strength and she refuses to give him the nurturing support he needs. “I’m not your mommy,” she snaps at him when he is at his most vulnerable. He then announces his plan to retire, and Tashi’s face echoes Patrick’s words regarding Art, “He’s ready to be dead.” I thought of that I TOLD YA tee-shirt which is like a symbol of authority taken away from Tashi and transferred to Patrick, which is literally the case when he swipes it.
Winners and Losers
In contrast, Patrick believes he has “one more season in him.” Tashi tells him it’s too late for that, just as Art tells Patrick it’s too late to rekindle the camaraderie they had in their youth. (Devastating scene) This leads to the highly unusual way of ending the story, and I think it was designed to underscore the idea that both Art and Tashi are wrong. The film’s screenwriter, Justin Kuritzkes, explained in a recent Vanity Fair article that the characters spend the entire film wanting “to get back to this moment in their youth when it wasn’t so fraught, when there was just a sort of innocent joy in being together.”
This, if anything, maybe the movie’s takeaway message: It’s never too late, the other message being that friendship and love should never be confused with zero-sum games.
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It’s not for nothing that Elon Musk chose it to represent the re-branding of Twitter.
Side note: There is a moment in Jules et Jim when Jules asks Catherine if she has a cigarette, exactly as Patrick does. Is that a nod, or what?
O’Connor is a freaking talent. For fun, I counted the different smiles, a baker’s dozen: Oily, Rakish, Smug, Sadistic, Mischievous, Jubilant, Friendly, Defiant, Wry, Taunting, Gloating, Vengeful, Disingenuous