“Are we still talking about tennis?” This query, paraphrased or exact, comes up a lot in Justin Kuritzkes’ magnificent screenplay for “Challengers” (opening today nationwide), a sports-centered psychodrama of the highest order. It’s the right question. In a script so laden with double entendres—and set in a world where romantic conquest and athletic success are inextricable—we’re left to suss out the answers ourselves.
With its rich echoes of Francois Truffaut’s landmark 1962 drama “Jules & Jim,” “Challengers” charts a 13-year love triangle involving two friends and occasional rivals on the men’s tennis circuit—Mike Faist’s highly ranked Art Donaldson and Josh O’Connor’s lesser-tiered Patrick Zweig—and the woman of their desires, Zendaya’s Tashi Duncan. While being jolted between three or four timelines with the immediacy of a slingshot, we learn that Art and Patrick grew up together, developed into best friends at the same tennis academy, and began to harbor intense feelings for Tashi, a Serena Williams-like court prodigy. In possibly the film’s best scene, the two men share a particularly intoxicating and vulnerable night with Tashi when all are teenagers, after which only one of them will enjoy the company of her bed, with the winner of their matchup the following day earning the spoils, as it were.
That heady period, full of pheromones and potential, couldn’t contrast more with the film’s primary setting, at a qualifying tournament in New Rochelle, New York, more than a dozen years later, when all three characters have been ground down by life. Despite coming from a wealthy bloodline, the manipulative Patrick cosplays as homeless, sleeping in his car and arguing that his very livelihood depends on his tournament winnings. Tashi, having suffered a career-ending knee injury a decade earlier, has become both wife and coach to Art, a star player on a recent losing streak who is looking for an easy, morale-boosting win by slumming it at the Challengers tourney. History has a habit of rhyming, so inevitably, Patrick and Art end up squaring off in the finals, Tashi once again dividing them.
This plot description does not—cannot—convey the complexity of “Challengers;” it’s a film whose emotional depths can only be measured in fathoms. The director is Luca Guadagnino, of “A Bigger Splash” and “Call Me By Your Name,” an artist for whom sexuality is a spectrum of ever-shifting fluidity, where terms like “gay” or “straight” feel hopelessly inadequate. So it is with “Challengers,” which lingers, at every chance it can get, on the homoerotic subtext surrounding Patrick and Art’s friendship-turned-enemyship. Even the food they consume together is phallic in nature. For Tashi, who is not above using sex as a bargaining chip, the two men were a package deal when they met, and the impression Guadagnino suggests is that she can’t be happy with just one of them. Then again, a full-time throuple relationship seems equally unsustainable. Hence, everybody is just … stuck.
“Challengers” often feels like a fever dream, with one visually audacious set piece after another. A midnight rendezvous during a windstorm in upstate New York is particularly unforgettable, and the soundtrack, by the seemingly ubiquitous audio wizards Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, swathes the action in a techno hypnosis.
And then there’s the novel way Guadagnino films tennis, as if nobody had ever filmed tennis before, as both an audio play of grunts and clatters and severe thwacks but as a kind of urban warfare—returns propelled from players’ rackets like bullets, shaky point-of-view angles shot as if from the trenches, slow-motion montages of muscles flexing in legs and the long journey of sweat beads from forehead to court.
But the game is not just a battlefield simulation. Tennis, in the almost unbearably tense world of “Challengers,” stands in for both confrontation and fornication, actions as twinned as the strands in a double helix of DNA. Without spoiling the action, the final frames of “Challengers” constitute nothing if not a symbolic orgasm: the blood-sweat-and-tears sports-movie ur-climax that is definitely about more than just tennis.
“Challengers” is playing now at Cinemark Boca Raton, IPIC Boca Raton, Movies of Delray and other area theaters.
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