Italian art-house director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name, I Am Love, Bones and All) returned last weekend with a film in a subgenre that has rarely been seen on the big screen in decades: a smart romantic drama about driven professionals. In this case, they’re competitive tennis players. Scripted by playwright Justin Kuritzkes, Challengers is also the rare sports drama that isn’t a biopic.
The deal
In 2019, two estranged friends face off at an ATP Challenger Tour tennis match in New Rochelle, N.Y. Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) is a pro with big endorsement deals, but lately he keeps losing. His wife and coach, former prodigy Tashi Donaldson (Zendaya), entered him in the event hoping for an easy victory to boost his confidence.
She couldn’t have guessed Art would end up playing his childhood friend and doubles partner, Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) — who, as it happens, was Tashi’s boyfriend back before an injury ended her own career. Low on cash and down on his luck, Patrick needs this win perhaps even more than Art does.
As the match proceeds, the action on the court alternates with flashbacks to the events that brought Art, Patrick and Tashi here. It all started on the fateful day when both then-teenage friends watched the young champion play and fell in love with her.
Will you like it?
A caveat: Knowing nothing about tennis, I came to Challengers for the juicy drama. Apparently, so did its director. “I’m going to say something that I shouldn’t say,” Guadagnino told Little White Lies, “but I’m not a great tennis watcher … It’s quite boring to me.”
Screenwriter Kuritzkes is better versed in the sport, but what really inspired him was its fodder for operatic conflict. “Sports fans are drama queens,” he told GQ, defying the traditional association of athletics with straight-and-narrow masculinity.
The film plumbs that inherent drama and then some. What initially attracts the two boys to Tashi isn’t just her aggressive playing but the piercing scream she utters when she makes the crucial point. At a party that night, she asks them why they play the game. Unsatisfied with Patrick’s flippant answer — that it’s better than getting a job — she sternly tells them that “Tennis is a relationship,” a meaningful back-and-forth with one’s opponent that isn’t so far removed from romance. She then illustrates her analogy by guiding the boys into an almost-threesome, largely depicted in a masterful single shot, that leaves them hot, bothered and fired up to beat each other on the court.
Tashi’s credo becomes the movie’s leitmotif: game as relationship, relationship as game — but a respectful, deadly serious game with high stakes. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ soundtrack underscores the comparison by giving the same pulsating techno beats to the sex scenes, the tennis matches and the psychological warfare among the three leads.
With its close focus on ever-shifting power dynamics — like rapid volleys over the net — Challengers is the Dangerous Liaisons of sports movies. It’s romantic but not a romance, in that it doesn’t depict any one couple as fated or necessary. Sure, scruffy, insouciant Patrick has hallmarks of the “bad boy,” and the chemistry between him and Tashi is palpable. But he’s too arrogant (and, perhaps, self-destructive) to let Tashi micromanage his career. So it’s the more easygoing Art who becomes her salvation after catastrophic injury leaves her craving an outlet for her energy.
O’Connor sinks his teeth into the role of Patrick, playing him with intensity and physicality. Faist shows all the fiery charisma he promised in West Side Story, and Zendaya commands the screen (despite being a little less believable as the older Tashi). While the men may be competitors, the screenplay depicts them as complementary — “fire and ice,” they were called in their doubles days — and Tashi clearly loves aspects of them both.
There’s nothing new about such complex entanglements, familiar from the golden age of Hollywood melodrama. We still see these “adult” relationships in streaming dramas, which give them more space to unfold.
But it feels fresh and exciting these days to find romantic intrigue in the pressure-cooker format of a theatrical feature. Challengers doesn’t have many hours to explore its characters, so it paints them in sure, telling strokes. And the tennis action, too, is anything but boring.
Guadagnino and cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom give us enough of the expected objective view of gameplay to render it comprehensible, and then they mix things up — shooting one exchange from the point of view of a player, for instance, and another from the point of view of the ball itself, careening over the net. It might make you seasick, but it’s worth it.
Challengers doesn’t reinvent anything: It’s a blast from the past powered by its creators’ formidable inventiveness and the dynamism of young, attractive actors. But sometimes that’s enough to score the match point.
If you like this, try…
Carnal Knowledge (1971; Prime, rentable): Guadagnino and Kuritzkes name this Mike Nichols classic as an inspiration: It follows two friends, played by Art Garfunkel (the “nice” one) and Jack Nicholson (the heel), through college into adulthood and marriage.
Wimbledon (2004; rentable): Paul Bettany plays a cynical older tennis player who takes a last shot at competition and sparks romantically with an up-and-comer (Kirsten Dunst) in this rom-com set on the court.
“Naomi Osaka” (2021; Netflix): This docuseries profiles the young Japanese tennis star who brought public attention to the physical and mental stress that athletes weather with the ups and downs of their careers.
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This article appears in May 1-7, 2024.
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