“Tennis is a relationship,” proclaims Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), a teenage phenom sitting on top of the world. She’s just won the Junior US Open, she has an Adidas campaign already, she is tapped to be the next big thing in professional tennis. Until, that is, an injury at Stanford ends her career before she ever has a chance to go pro.
Years later, Tashi is married to Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), one of the top tennis players in the world. He’s won every grand slam title several times over…except the US Open. Tashi is not only his wife but his coach, and to help him break a slump, she enters Art into a local “challengers” tournament, usually populated by the lower-level players that make up the pro circuit. There, Art meets his former best friend, and Tashi’s former boyfriend, the one man Art has never been able to beat: Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor). Rather than the glamor of Flushing, Challengers’ biggest game plays out on a mundane racquet club court.
Challengers presents itself as a twisty and twisted erotic thriller, but it’s not that twisted and, frankly, not erotic at all. Sex scenes are “fade to black”, and the best sex bit in the film is a bit of physical comedy involving a boner. Zendaya is hot as hell, and so are Faist and O’Connor, so there is sex appeal aplenty on screen, but none of it is aimed at anything, and much of it is played for emotions other than titillation. Patrick has never lived up to his potential and bounces from low-end tournament to low-end tournament, living out of his car and playing with a broken racket. He tries to charm a motel clerk into giving him a room without a card on file and her stony reception is another instance of humor piercing sexuality.
Similarly, Tashi and Art’s marriage is clearly a disaster, and though Art really seems to care about Tashi beyond the court, Tashi is a sieve, everything passes through, nothing touches her. She only cares about tennis, she only cares about Art winning the US Open, whether or not she actually hates Art is open to debate, but she definitely doesn’t respect him. Everyone in this film desperately needs therapy.
At best, Challengers lives up to Tashi’s proclamation that “tennis is a relationship”. The most compelling sequences happen on the court, whether it’s watching young Tashi’s fierce competitiveness, or Art and Patrick “talking” to each other through serves and volleys, their tennis play communicating everything they withhold in conversation. Director Luca Guadagnino, cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, and editor Marco Costa collaborate to create ecstatic tennis sequences; at one point, the audiences’ heads swivel in time with dialogue just as the on-screen spectators follow volleys.
And there is something humorously appealing about how Guadagnino frames the mundane spaces that Challengers occupies. Written by Justin Kuritzkes, much of the film takes place in boring hotel rooms and lobbies, parking lots, and an Applebee’s (their best product placement since Talladega Nights). Even the site of Art and Patrick’s epic showdown is a slightly rundown racquet club in New Rochelle, New York, not any sort of international jet set tennis competition. The contrast of Tashi and Art’s “quiet luxury” style with these boring ass suburban settings is lowkey funny, they’re hugely successful, famous, and rich, and spend so much of their time in soulless places, a hell of their own making.
But Challengers falls short of its own perverse tone, never pushing the envelope as far or hard as the script signals it wants to. Forget the sex scenes, the emotional landscape of Challengers is basic, these are three people who never had childhoods in pursuit of ultimate athletic prowess and they’re all f-cked up as a result. It’s a dime a dozen story, but no one within the narrative seems to realize it. It would be slyly funny, like the boring settings, if Tashi stormed around like a tennis monster but there was some underlying sense of her attitude being out synch with the reality around her. But she just is the tennis monster she seems, there is nothing more to Tashi than what sits on the surface.
Which is the crux the issue—Zendaya is miscast. She’s reaching for the kind of controlled, icy performance that put Nicole Kidman on the map in To Die For, but she can’t get past Tashi’s obvious wounds. She’s best when Tashi is vulnerable, at her least believable when we’re supposed to see Tashi as a manipulator, playing her two lovers against each other in the name of victory. Zendaya, who carries a quality of vulnerability in her performance, only ever makes Tashi seem sad. When she goes for cruelty or plotting, she just seems like a hurt kid lashing out. Which Tashi is on some level, clearly, she never recovered from the loss of her career. But the flipside of that is what the script sets up, that Tashi has this frigid calculating side, but that never really plays. At most, Zendaya manages to make Tashi seem unbelievably mean, but that’s not the same thing.
Challengers isn’t bad, it’s just a mixed bag. Some things work really well, like the tennis sequences and Art and Patrick having ten years’ worth of conversations in one volley. Other things don’t work as well, such as the film’s central conceit that this is some kind of erotic and/or psychological thriller. The film simply isn’t as smart as it thinks it is, the characters not as complex, and it’s DEFINITELY not as sexy as the marketing suggests. “Tennis is a relationship”, but tennis is only part of Challengers. The best part, easily, but the actual relationship part doesn’t work as well as the central metaphor. Challengers is like Tashi Duncan’s career—promising, but its potential is never realized.
Challengers is now playing exclusively in theaters.
