Watching Luca Guadagnino’s brilliant new film Challengers, I couldn’t help but ponder one important question: Was Guadagnino an Eastbound and Down fan before he took over the Suspiria remake from David Gordon Green, or did it only happen after they became friends? Because if there’s a prime antecedent for this absurdly funny yet deeply complex tennis picture, it’s the misadventures of the Greatest Fucking Ball Player to Ever Walk the Fucking Earth – Kenny Fuckin’ Powers. Now, this isn’t to say that Challengers goes to the same sort of ridiculous ends that Gordon Green and Jody Hill took that series – there’s no Southern-fried Will Ferrell shooting artillery at Zendaya in this, as cool as that might have been – but there is a similarity in mindset, unmasking and exploring the complicated ids and egos of athletes while both highlighting the beauty of their sport and skewering the constructed world they inhabit. It may be somewhat of a departure from what audiences have come to expect from Guadagnino in the wake of Suspira and Bones and All. Still, Guadagnino remains at the top of his game, delivering a breezy yet engrossing film that’s probably his best play for mainstream respect since Call Me by Your Name.
Most of Challengers is set in flashback – we open in the present at the start of the championship match in a Challenger tournament, which is sort of an open-invite minor league professional tennis event that the ATP holds in smaller venues around the world. This one’s in New Rochelle, and the town’s abuzz because one of the biggest icons in the sport, Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), has entered and made his way, as expected, to the final. His wife and coach, Tashi (Zendaya), watches from the stands as he turns to face his opponent, Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), a washed-up has-been never-was who, through some cosmic coincidence, managed to play good tennis and find his way to the final, even if he’s had to sleep in his car and beg the tournament’s organizers for bites of their Dunkin’ breakfast sandwiches. Some in the crowd know that these two players have history – once upon a time, they were the hot shots in the amateur scene, friendly competitors as well as doubles partners, and the best of friends – but only Tashi, who grimaces as she watches her husband serve, knows the full extent of the story, and how ludicrous the path to this match was. That was because she – a former tennis prodigy herself, who once outshined both of them and had Adidas sponsorships and parties thrown in her honor – may have been, in her own words, “the homewrecker” that caused Art and Patrick to acrimoniously split.
Once upon a time – back in the final years of the Bush administration – these two tennis pros were just horny kids, both of whom fell in love with Tashi after watching her play in the championship in the amateur section of the US Open. They immediately begin to compete over her, and she’s happy to indulge their attention. The scene that will leave everyone talking involves an aborted threesome, in which the masterful way that Tashi’s able to manipulate these dudes winds up in them making out with each other in a shitty Flushing hotel room and sets up the collapse to come. Tashi promises her phone number to the winner, and it’s Patrick – not Art, her eventual husband – who walks away with her digits and starts to date her. Art is insanely jealous, and his proximity to Tashi once the three leave the tournament gives him plenty of opportunities to try and pry her out of his pal’s grasp. Patrick goes pro early, while Art and the object of his desire head to Stanford to play collegiate tennis. There, Tashi’s tennis career comes to a painful end, and Patrick’s involvement in it is where their paths fully diverge. Tashi and Art go on to become pros – one away from a grand slam – while Patrick’s hunting for Tinder dates simply so he doesn’t have to sleep in his car for a night. But Art’s sick of playing tennis, and Tashi realizes that she might not want to be on the sidelines in his retirement. Her skills as a masterful manipulator start to rear their head. They go to the Challenger with the hopes of getting Art, on a losing streak, back on the path to greatness after beating up on some mediocre talent in New Rochelle, and Patrick is the last major obstacle. Conversely, Patrick sees beating his former pal as a way to make it in tennis finally and perhaps as a way to get Tashi back in his corner.
Screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes – a novelist and playwright who transitioned to the silver screen with this work – brings literary scope and depth to the events as documented here. The flashbacks follow the structure of the match, with the action rising in bursts of intense energy and breaking following a sort of emphatic finish, be it a cutting barb or action, and its chronological grouping resembles sets, with decades worth of frustration escalating the conflict until Match Point. Kuritzkes has an intense empathy for his characters but sees them with as close to an unbiased clarity as he can get – even if we’re witnessing a flashback rooted in a specific perspective, it’s not Rashomon, with the truth being the truth. We, and the characters, can ponder motivations and dig into the characters’ backgrounds. Still, there’s a kind of high-level survey that keeps us kind of impartial and also opens up each one of our protagonists to ridicule. But Guadagnino leans into his perspective on tennis – with Tashi’s axiom that tennis is just a form of conversation acting as a kind of thesis statement for how the film operates – and underscores each argument by using the same extract from the Reznor/Ross score (a truly fantastic outing from the pair) that accompanies the on-court action as the chosen score for each argument our characters get into.
It’s in the way that Guadagnino and Kuritzkes communicate the professional athlete’s worldview through their characters and this structure that the comparison to Eastbound and Down presents itself. All of Kenny’s interpersonal conflicts are external manifestations of the way he sees the world from the mound – unless you’re there to field the ball when he allows a batter to get a hit, you’re most likely the person he’s hurling fastballs at – and the piece-by-piece way in which all of his interactions lead him towards a goal (fame, etc.) mirrors his path to the World Series in earlier parts of his career. The length of the baseball season lends itself well to television, but Challengers preserves the ephemeral nature of a championship game. We learn the context, realize the stakes, watch as our core trio makes their way to Match Point, and celebrate the astonishing release that follows the final point. The pair behind the scenes and the trio in front are working at the top of their game, and each seizes the moment. If this is Zendaya’s big moment in which she fully moves into the world of “adult” cinema (as opposed to TV soaps and sci-fi epics), it’s one hell of an audacious one.Faist and O’Connor are deliriously strong as a pair of recognizable athlete stereotypes who still transcend the cookie-cutter boundaries of that descriptor. Ultimately, Challengers is everything its audience writes onto a high-stakes tennis match when they watch one in real life – breezy, dramatic, intense, absurdly funny, weirdly sexy, and, above all else, thrilling to witness unfold.