Three sweaty faces. This is the opening shot of Challengers, the most inventive pop film since Everything Everywhere All At Once. These people are revealed to be Tashi Donaldson, Patrick Zweig, and Art Donaldson, all prestigious tennis players past their primes who have been in a complicated love triangle and/or throuple for the past 13 years. The film starts with a tennis match between Patrick and Art in a 2019 Challenger event, and quite honestly, I did not care one bit at this point. Then, after a few points scored later, the film rolls back to 2006 and this is where the greatness reveals itself.
Back in this time, then teenagers Patrick and Art won the boys’ junior doubles title in the U.S. Open, where they then see Tashi dominating the women’s tournament and both fall deeply in love with her at first sight. They invite her to their hotel room, where she then offers her phone number to the person that wins the match, citing her motivation as wanting to see “some good fucking tennis”. After an intense match, Patrick wins and he and Tashi soon go off to Stanford to play college tennis. From this starting section, the brilliance of this film is palpable. The thematic threads of desire and jealousy are formed and the camerawork starts showing its enigmatic nature, every scene from conversations on the beach to intense tennis matches tries something unique with the form of cinema and even more shockingly, it works every single time in elevating the scenes.
Right away, this short segment also establishes the relationship dynamics that the rest of the film follows. Patrick is more dominant, Art is more passive, Tashi only really cares about tennis, Tashi guides the two boys into making out and they maybe enjoy it a little more than they want to admit. Most so called “love triangles” only form two line segments with two men both desiring a girl or two girls both desiring a boy (I love the cishet dominated movie industry), but Challengers truly does make a love triangle, though it’s awfully difficult to figure out where the lines go. The three don’t know how to communicate their desires to each other, their respective wants slowly kill them inside, and the only way they know how to talk is through their secret language of hitting a ball with a racket.
And this is what makes the film work as a sports narrative. Director Luca Guadagnino knows that normal tennis is pretty boring, in an interview he revealed that he doesn’t even like watching tennis. But by turning each game into a conversation, a tense battle to see whose desires are stronger, every single play is exhilarating, every set becomes a conclusion to a story, the emotional distance between the characters close for a brief few moments where they begin to understand each other.
The age of mindless superhero movies dominating theaters is over – the biggest films of the year include Dune Part Two, a brilliant adaptation of the most influential science fiction novel ever; Civil War, a film that explores the ethics and importance of war journalism; and Monkey Man, a thrilling action debut from Dev Patel. Audiences are sick of stale, boring, toothless visual noise and have been turning to exciting cinematic works and a potential new golden age of cinema has begun. Go watch Challengers to show your support of these new developments, or if you just want to see some good fucking tennis.