Zedaya joins Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor’s doubles match that lobs up an easy serve but scores a fat bagel by the time the match is over.
DIRECTED BY: LUCA GUADAGNINO/2024
Challengers is the latest film from Italian director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name, Suspiria) which delves into the world of Tennis and a complicated love triangle, in a script from Justin Kuritzkes. The film bounces back and forth from 2019 to different periods in time over the previous 14 years to explore the interwined relationships that reach their breaking point in a final match of a challenger event in New Rochelle, New York in 2019.
While the film starts in 2019, right before a final match in a challenger tournament (a lower level professional tournament that helps tennis players qualify for the U.S. open if they are not in the top 100 in their ranking), it is through a flashback that we learn how our three main characters meet. Tashi (Zendaya) is a former tennis prodigy who upon deciding to forego turning pro to attend Stanford meets two friends and tennis doubles partners, Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zwieg (Josh O’Connor). Believing her to be out of their league, they invite her to talk on the beach while they smoke, which leads to an invite to their hotel room.
Art and Patrick have been friends since they were 12 years old. Tashi flirts with both saying she doesn’t want to be a homewrecker, implying that these two friends are really in love with each other. The start of a threesome that night leads to the two friends making out with each other while Tashi lays on the bed watching before heading out. When they realize she is no longer kissing them and they are kissing each other, they both quickly ask for her number but she let’s them know that she’ll only share her number with the one of them who wins their match against the other the following day. While Patrick wins out and goes on to date Tashi, while turning pro, it is Art who also is attending Stanford with Tashi and is there when a tragic injury sidelines Tashi from the sport that she loves.
As we learn in the opening scene, Tashi ends up marrying Art who after 12 years with Tashi as his wife and coach, has done quite well for himself, winning all of the major tournaments except the U.S. Open. He is recovering from injury, and suffering from a lack of confidence. Tashi seeks to enter him into the challenger tournament simply to help him play in a warm-up situation for the U.S. Open, but more importantly, to get his confidence back. What Art doesn’t know is that his estranged friend, and Tashi’s former boyfriend Patrick, who has been a washed up player for nearly a decade, is playing in this same tournament, trying to take his last shot at making it in the sport they all love. This sets up an encounter that will bring all of their relationships for a collision course that will culminate on the court.
Challengers is well acted and the director is able to bring good tension into the tennis matches themselves, but overall the film feels like a lob more than an ace in terms of its impact. Tashi, as a character, speaks loftily of how tennis is all there is, and the beauty she finds both in playing it and watching it when all of the trash talk and posturing by the players goes away and all that is left is the game itself…and winning. When that isn’t happening, we see that she doesn’t have much passion, but more indifference, to the life she leads. This includes her relationship with her husband, and even to her daughter. She seems to only go through the motions.
Art is much the same as he has always been a person who could be great, but lacks the internal fire to spark any passion unless someone else does it for him. First this was Patrick growing up, and then Tashi once they married and she started coaching him. Patrick has always been good, but never took anything seriously, and he never grew up. As a result, instead of playing off of each other’s weaknesses and creating strengths, the film tries to build to a climax with what his happening in the drama on court, but there just isn’t enough sympathy for the characters themselves to even know who or what to cheer for as it all crashes together. You kind of don’t really care who “wins” as they all seem to be losing something no matter the outcome of the match.
The script just lobs Tashi into the middle of Art and Patrick and has her bounce back and forth betwen the metaphorical “racquets” of her husband and former boyfriend in a complicated love triangle that seems to work itself out rather easily when all is said and done. The previously alluded to homosexual attraction of Art and Patrick is never revisted despite many nods towards it throughout the film. It simply is discussed and alluded to, never resolved, and the thread is left dangling somewhere in the second act. The script takes great pains to hide the result of the final match between Art and Patrick but by the time it arrives, the film had telegraphed its ending over an hour into the film, rendering the ending predictable.
The climatic final game to win the match lands out of bounds rendering much of the film that you just finished, pointless. While Zendaya elevates every scene she is in, the director focuses on the hip factor of ending many of her scenes by just having Zendaya’s Tashi sit and brood, or having her walking away, both with accompanying slow motion effects and some cool, retro, pulsating 80’s synth music from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. A bit too much style over substance without allowing these scenes to futher develop the character.
After all is said and done, Challengers is much like the event it is named after. Its not the premier level event at the cinema, but it provides enough to entertain. The main cast is good despite the material, and given a better script that addresses the very plot lines it introduces, the cast could have pulled it together nicely given their chemistry together. The soundtrack stands out nicely, even if the film as a whole is served up with the result being a big fat bagel.
