Luca Guadagnini makes no bones about his ambition in the tennis melodrama ‘Challengers’ featuring a love triangle between three tennis pros he will turn down the volume on everything, including the sound of his own grandmother, if it brings him closer to the end goal of winning Wimbledon. He approaches the film like a tennis player focuses on a single shot with aggressive precision everywhere he’s turned, every sequence is meant to emphasize a single powerful serve of the narrative.
Fans of Tennis will especially love how Guadagnini demonstrates the rush in typical matchless through different angles such as from the perspective of a rapidly hit ball. It’s so wildly eccentric, but it is also beautifully entertaining and that’s what the sentiment of the film is trying to portray to you.
In ‘Challengers’ Zendaya plays Tashia, who is a former teenage tennis prodigy reminiscent of the Williams era athletes, but sustained a career ending injury, prompting her to focus on business. She now manages the career of her husband, a promising tennis player named Art which is played by Mike Feist (West Side Story). Though Tashia has managed Art’s career, Art often possesses the ability to reach success on his own, making him quite the likable character in this story. When the film begins, Art is in a state of identity crisis.
As if she had other options, Tashia decides to take him back and have him compete in a low tier championship match, hoping that he may find the passion and emotion he had when she first saw him.
But there is a hidden agenda here, one whose reasons and schemes such as they exist are completely absent from us: one of the participants who is anticipated to feature in the match is Patrick (Josh O’Connor), a scruffy businessman who once used to be Art’s best friend until Tashia split them up. Literally split them up: in the miracle of many non tennis spectacle in “Challengers,” there is a long flashback in which Tashia comes into the sight of the two still within the tournament and shares a bed with both men and makes out with them, only for Art and Patrick to start kissing each other, and there is Tashia who sits up, having disengaged from the intertwining body mass of what is clearly a four way kiss and smiles uncontrollably at the sight of the lovemaking she has masterminded.
What, in that case, is the engine of Tashia? The film allows us to search her psychology and heart further than the edges, but does not make it compelling enough for us to get basic information about her inner emotional world so as to make clear conclusions about her.
We have some understanding of Tashia grit and why she doesn’t give up on Art easily. But why does Patrick, who discovers early on at the Art-finds-his-roots tournament that Tashia cherishes him too, seem to have a more powerful sexual chemistry with Tashia than he does with Patrick? It is not clear. Their bond is more animal than cerebral. And Art? Most of the time, kindness. He’s not a bad guy, reasonably intelligent too.
It is a feeling that he knows full well that there is some situation between Tashia and Patrick that remains unspoken. But he has shown an appreciation for being the first “winner” of this relationship competition and now appears confident that Tashia will remain true to him and that, therefore, it’s better to let events unfold naturally at this stage.
What a situation! The very instability of this situation is what keeps “Challengers” alert even when it is abutting getting snagged by the plotting of Justin Kibitzes’ screenplay and the sequence cutting of Marco Costa as well as the historical and contemporary exhibitions of storytelling that is in itself a disorienting factor.
There is a stimulating sub-genre of movies that opens, intense, spectacular, treats the history and evolution of relations in a nonlinear mode; “Blue Valentine” and “Two for The Road” are very good examples of it and this movie does that with style, while supplementing it with many beautifully blocked, framed and edited sequences of sports action that all together depict a tennis fan movie as though it were a boxing picture. (Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor’s score is furious, unyielding and explosive, the electronic companion to Deep in My Heart from the days of movie spectacles.)
Is “Challengers” just too ambitious for its own good? Or too much? Or perhaps how the late, great Village Voice critic Andrew Sarris would have put it- less than meets the eye? Probably. It kind of goes on into the whirlpool of its narrative and technical ambitions in the last quarter.
And perhaps there were just too many brilliant cuts from one time to another, sometimes at times when the action on screen is so absorbing, this should continue for some time without cutting away or jumping to another thing. And what are the American New Wave 70s What just happened and what is its meaning, closure since it was unearned.
“Challengers” has an almost primitive quality to it that is almost as if the viewer has to fend for themselves. It is not, however, in any way unobtrusive; it is a slow, creeping hand that approaches the viewer and says, “Come, come see the beautiful art.” This film can be understood in the same manner as those Bogart and Bacall romances from the 1940s where every scene was too intense and raunchy as if the lines had been said right.
In other words, the film sticks to the Hollywood approach rather then the cane’s approach and that is ok and invigorating. It appears that the contemporary adult has some form of phobia surrounding sex. Budgets of more than a certain level seem to come with strings attached, where the actual content or entertainment has to be packaged in a way to be accepted by a wider audience, which is a complete bore.
It is truly regrettable how the term “adult movie” is almost entirely used in relation to erotic/pornographic films as it also defines the kind of work that has themes that children can’t fully grasp because they are children.
All three leads act as if they belong to the film industry. Buoyed by his always willing to perform DOP Seymour Madero (who shot two other films by Guadagnini as well as some by Acheampong Weerasethakul), Guadagnini is making both the court and the screen performers look like those legends all together they are so fortunate to have on the cast. It certainly is a treat to watch three youngsters bring to life a ‘flirtation in quality of accent’ which the teachers of cinema classically thought was a must have sphere inherent in grown-up film actors. But at this particular time in the 21st-century history of American cinema, who knows how to do it?
She has that Romeo and Julia Roberts look during 90’s and early 00’s while playing so many roles who ooze out a self of authority. Zendaya has that quality of an alpha queen where she plays a blank canvas with so much depth. A young woman who should feel comfortable in her presence.
That same spirit is in Tashia, who still appears powerful, even when a turn of events takes professional tennis from her and reduces her to a subdued business and media juggler. Feist manages to perform the difficult role of a nice guy who is loyal and strong, but may not be strong enough to stand the heat that the two characters who seem on course to put him through the wringer, can produce.
O’Connor’s partially open mouth acting, dark looks, unshaven, sweaty body and wrinkled and filthy garments, make him a modern day version of a 1970s Elliot Gould or Donald Sutherland, who people associate with their clutters but with a more cynical approach. He has a dangerously pleasing unstable factor which is very appropriate for this movie.
The view on the central figures is that of an outsider looking in. Even when the camera and editing fragments the narrative and reinterprets meanings and truths, the mind and heart of any of the key protagonists is always withheld from public view. It isn’t that kind of film. The way the United States Open is viewed, is the same way this one is viewed from a distance. Power is the be all and end all. Who is winning? Who is losing? Does a comeback seem possible?
It is a sports film in which the impact of all actions in the arena are simply as an intensified portrayal of the true events of the players’ lives, and that is all that they are. There are several scenes in this film where one of the central characters of the film is shown a confrontation on the court with one of the other two, and we hold our breath, knowing who will come out the victor who gets to play the ace card when the time comes.
This film does not run out steam and has one consistent storyline throughout that runs counter to the emotional at its heart beat and for the viewer this is irrelevant because of the way it has been filmed. One too many blows and the audience is knocked out cold in awe. The objective is not simply to make a casual joke or a cheap laugh there are winnings at stake and full effort goes to bringing them home.
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