Challengers
Everything in the world is about sex - except sex. Sex is about power. It’s unclear who this quote’s originator is. Some say it’s Oscar Wilde. When in doubt, blame it on Winston Churchill (or Abraham Lincoln).
This week’s substack will be about Luca Guadagnino’s newest movie Challengers. If you haven’t seen it yet and are one of those people who feel terribly offended by movies being spoiled on the internet, maybe this is the time for you to bid farewell for today. Don’t forget to come back next week.
Much has been said and written about this movie already, some calling it the movie of the year, others blasting it for its vapidness, all of them mentioning the sex scenes. Before we go any further, there are no sex scenes. There are a few make-out sessions between young, beautiful Hollywood stars if you’re into nerdy-looking white boys (everyone’s into Zendaya) and a lot of implication of sex being had somewhere off screen. It’s not The Dreamers.
The sex lingers in the air at all times, though, like a perfume which stays in the room long after its wearer has left. There’s a whiff of it in the on-court sweat. There’s an inkling of it in Zendaya’s monologue about how playing a tennis match is the most intimate thing you can do with another person. There is the driving soundtrack by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the chosen tune of the summer already, an EDM beat that creates tension from nothingness. And there is, of course, the churro scene. Patrick and Art, the two male protagonists, eating each other’s churros. That’s it, that’s the sentence.
Patrick is played by Josh O’Connor who steals the movie. Art is played by Maik Faist who gets closest to making it work as a tennis player and Tashi is played by Zendaya who really comes into her own here having to play an ultimately disagreeable character. I, personally, did not find Tashi disagreeable at all. I think she is one of the best female characters we’ve had in pop culture in a while but I will get to that later.
If you have already seen the film, skip this next passage, as it is solely the synopsis of the plot.
Patrick, Art und Tashi are aspiring junior players. They meet for the first time at the US Open juniors’ event where all three of them reach the final. The boys are friends, doubles partners and rivals and before playing each other in the final they win the doubles’ title with the most ridiculous tweener the world has ever seen. Tashi wins the girls’ tournament and after Zendaya’s impeccable dance scene (I rate it just slightly lower than Ralph Fiennes’ dance moment in A Bigger Splash) and a hot make-out sesh in a terrible chain hotel room, she tells Patrick and Art that whoever wins the title will get her phone number. My girl only dates champions, you see. She dates Patrick for a while, they have a huge fight after another not-a-sex-scene sex scene, Tashi gets injured and becomes Art’s coach and wife. He ends up having a successful career, Patrick doesn’t. But in a classic tale of the people you see on your way up are the same people you will see on your way down Art and Patrick meet in the final of a challenger tournament and old feelings are stirred.
Ok, we got through it, now back to the fun stuff.
The three of them are straight-forward archetypes of tennis players. I touched on this in my Guardian review (which you can read here: Challengers) but didn’t have enough space to elaborate on it. Patrick is talented but doesn’t have the work ethic. Art plays boring percentage tennis but through his discipline builds a career. And Tashi, well, Tashi has it both until she doesn’t any longer; a prospect erased by a gory knee injury. She also has a thing neither of the men do: desire.
The movie on the surface is about sex. In reality, it’s about desire. Patrick and Art might desire Tashi in a traditional sexual desire type of way but Tashi desires something entirely different. She wants success and money and a better way of living. The men are her pawns in the game of life. Her fervor is so strong that some of it seeps through Art and manifests in an accomplished tennis career for him.
Over the course of the movie, we learn that Patrick and Art come from a wealthy background. Tashi, on the other hand, doesn’t. Understanding this made me see her in a different way. Some people have argued she is the movie’s villain. She is not. She is just a psychological victim of the circumstances. Her mind, her worldview, is shaped by her background. She doesn’t have the luxury to waste her life and talent on the challengers’ tour only to return home to work for her daddy’s company in case all else fails like Patrick does. She cannot fathom somebody throwing away a decently successful tennis career because it’s gotten hard and he’s lacking motivation like Art. Why bother, when a fall from grace is softened by cashmere bed linens.
She would do it all differently if she’d just get the chance. Her hunger for a better life is on display in the costume design. In the Cartier jewellery, the Chanel espadrilles and the Augustinus Bader body lotion. “Quiet luxury” that is quiet to absolutely no one.
She’s enraged with Patrick because he wastes his talent away like a bum. Her rage morphs into passion for him and back into rage. Almost as if she’s trying to imprint her own ambition onto Patrick through sex. When it fails and all that is left of him is an empty devilishly-charming-crooked-smile-wearing-talent-wasting fuckboy she returns to rage.
When do kids get angry? When they feel powerless. Tashi’s anger on a deeper level is just impotence.
She doesn’t even have anger left for Art. For him, who falters like a poppy in the first dust of a storm, she has only contempt to spare.
The reason why she seems like a villain to some is the trifecta of what a woman should never be: angry, ambitious and contemptuous. In the end, sex and beauty and manipulation is the only power she still possesses. Because everything in the world is about sex – except sex. Sex is about power.
She might seem like a person who is unable to love. To truly, unconditionally love somebody. That’s purely because she has already given her heart away to tennis. Those of us who are in it know, it will never give it back.
Through the lens of tennis, with the help of tennis, the movie’s writer Justin Kuritzkes accomplishes a character study of a complicated woman. I loved, loved Tashi. The evilest thing Justin Kuritzkes does to her is take away her talent; the one thing that was her way out. But yet still, she finds power in the crumbs he has left her.
Luca Guadagnino’s genius is to take a character study set in the world of tennis – could there possibly be anything more boring – and make it the most fun movie of the year. Quick cuts, fantastic set design, a hypnotic beat in the background: two hours and some fly by like the protagonist’s drops of sweat and the glimpses of thighs. My only note: tennis players have better legs. No offence.
There are class and race nuances webbed into this film that prefers to remain fun for the most part. Based on those nuances, however, is how I interpret the last scene. Patrick and Art, two wealthy white boys reunited once again, kindred spirits at heart, all the while Tashi sits on the sideline and can do nothing but watch. For them, rules are there to be broken. For Tashi, it’s a system she needs to find a way to survive in. It’s not fair, it never was. Just like tennis.
The movie opens with a shot of symmetry. The net and lines of the tennis court in perfect order. It’s the last shot of said order before everything devolves into chaos. My proposal for Challengers 2: Tashi’s daughter shows the same talent her mother had in early years who becomes her coach. Can the mother/daughter relationship survive? Can Tashi set aside her own ambitions to save their rapport? Only time will tell.
The biggest disconnect in tennis to me has always been the reputation of a bougie sport where the audience supposedly rattles its Rolexes while clapping, when many of the best tennis players you know do not come from money. There are exceptions and we love and appreciate them just the same but they are solely that: exceptions. Thankfully, the tennis audience has changed over the course of the last few decades and maybe will change even more with the existence of this film.
If you’re still with me, I’m sorry this was so long. As you can see I had thoughts. What did I miss? What was your interpretation of the ending? I can’t wait to hear what you all thought about it.
Things that make me happy:
I recently started reading An Imaginary Life by David Malouf. David is an Australian writer and poet and it’s the first time I’m reading his work. The language he uses is beautiful and poetic - I can’t read more than ten pages a day because I want to savour every single word. The ten pages a day by David Malouf make me extremely happy this week.
Things that make me unhappy:
In preparation for this text I read a lot of reviews by different critics and so many thought it a silly, witty, brilliant idea to use as many tennis puns in their pieces as possible. I’m on a lifelong mission to eradicate all tennis puns from the culture the moment tennis somehow becomes relevant. I’m sure, we as a society are smarter than that? Clearly not. Game, set and match. Ugh.
I will see you all next week. Go have a churro with hazelnut cream!
Yours truly, Andrea
I think you nailed the descriptions of the personalities, but I cannot in good conscience recommend this movie to anyone who seriously follows ATP-WTA matches. The tennis portions were not believable and I didn't find any real redeemable qualities in the stuck-in- adolescent development of the men. Mostly unmemorable scenes.
On a different note, I love your writing, especially comments like "... being on a lifelong mission to eradicate all tennis puns from the culture the moment tennis somehow becomes relevant." Your sense of humor really comes through, even when you're doing Tennis Channel commentary.
The community of diehard tennis fans appreciates your intellect and analysis, Please stay writing here, and possibly do a quasi-nonfictional account of behind the scenes of the WTA.
Lorrie Drogin
Pasadena, CA
Challengers to me is really two movies. The first movie, about the relationship between the three characters, is why its doing so well at the box office against all odds. I think, and Andrea covered this well, that the basic arc of the three of them is well done. I mean, its not exactly The Unbearable Lightness of Being but its not aiming for that, either.
But for me, after the last tennis movie I saw, King Richard, the second "movie," in Challengers which is, I guess, a tennis movie, well, that suffers from not having one Andrea Petkovic on board as script advisor. I don't know how movies are made technically, but I found the "cgi the moving ball in later" technique to be obvious as fake to all tennis players, although, again, this isn't really a tennis movie. Maybe its hard to get full on "tennis stunt doubles" who look enough like the actors to hit balls. But anyway, that was done well enough.
I wonder if Andrea agrees that she would have corrected the following obvious, easy, corrections.
1. I know the director wanted one shot where every other spectator follows the ball side to side and Tashi does not, but come on, no tennis coach sits and watches a match at the netpost. You would not place a players box at any net post. It would work in the script if Tashi was at one end, and then can have, as coaches do, interactions with players as they change ends.
2. It was unbelievable, and unnecessary, that the top US girls junior and the top two US boys juniors have never even heard of each other prior to the finals of the US Open juniors. Never met up in a hotel room, yes, but that would have been an easy correction.
3. Actual pros and their coaches don't take a little ball picker upper thingie on to a tournament court. What actually happens, with the coach standing by the player as the player hits with a practice partner would have worked just as well.
4. But so much for nits, the last two for me were the biggest. First, Patrick the player is said to have been on tour for thirteen or whatever years straight, and is in a challenger. Nothing odd about that, but what is odd is his financial status is portrayed as a step up from a homeless guy. For dramatic tension, the wisp of his wealthy family is in there. But as a character, he's the "loser" of the three and he's hardly a loser as a tennis player.
5. Second, the suggestion that Art is sort of an untalented grinder who Tashi coaches into a MULTIPLE GRAND SLAM SINGLES CHAMPION MULTI MILLIONAIRE WITH ASTON MARTIN ENDORSEMENTS but yet is lacking in depth and "excitement" compared to Patrick, and most importantly, is lacking in drive (are you effing kidding me?) as compared to Tashi is completely unbelievable. I am sure many non tennis fans didn't even notice this, but it would have been an easy fix. A more deep fix, I think, would have been for Tashi to have been coaching not only Art but other players. Or maybe a tennis manager, then, instead of the equally ridiculous line "if you don't win tomorrow I am going to leave you" it could have been the completely believable but equally dramatic "after this tournament maybe I shouldn't also be your manager." A professional split with a hint at an emotional split would have done the same job dramatically.
Also, the end is intentionally ambiguous, but its not helped by being the most unrealistic tennis point of the entire movie. Ugh.