I’ve never been a sports person. Some years I don’t even watch the Super Bowl. But Challengers had me on the edge of my seat.
Challengers is about relationships. It’s about platonic bonds and lust. It’s about love and heartbreak. It’s about commitment and cutting people off.
Challengers is about tennis. It’s about serves and reading tells. It's about scores and strategy. It’s about hitting balls with rackets at 100mph, back-and-forth, back-and-forth.
And Challengers unifies these two things. Challengers throws you into this labyrinth of love and lust, of lies and dreams, but it’s always about tennis. The story unfolds non-linearly, introducing crucial bits from the past at the right moments and pacing a slow-drip of juicy relationship drama that accelerates the film forward. But this crazy love triangle back-and-forth mimics perfectly the back-and-forth of the ball on the court, the highs and lows and tension of the game itself.
Challengers would go down as a great film in the sports canon solely because of it’s cinematographic achievements. The shots in the tennis match are extremely memorable and inventive, and evoke the creativity of the boxing scenes in Scorsese’s Raging Bull. But the daring innovation doesn’t stop there. The score, a beat-heavy, clubby EDM mix inexplicably fits right at home on the green courts. I commend the bravery to push forward with such a bold vision - the first time the music appears in this film I thought it sounded ridiculous, but it quickly feels perfect for the environment and I can’t imagine the film without it.
The thing that elevates Challengers to a truly remarkable level, however, is, as touched upon, this mirroring between the sports world and the interpersonal world - or, pushed further, the sports world as the interpersonal world. Tashi, Zendaya’s character, fails to separate the two, stating in the middle of a particularly intimate moment, “we’re always talking about tennis.” Tennis is her world, and as much as she wants to, she won’t let herself escape it.
Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor also give incredible performances: both in the fast-paced back-and-forth fight for Tashi’s heart as well as in the fast-paced back-and-forth on the court. But also in their own relationship, and their love of each other. Guadagnino loves showing smiles, smirks, grins - dozens of different gestures for dozens of different nuanced emotions, friendly or cunning, excited or nervous. And the actors can not only put on these masks, but also know how to wear them.
Challengers is one of the greatest sports movies of all time. Not only does it show the sport in an exciting new way, but it also elevates what makes a sports film a sports film. It has the rhythm of tennis inside it. I don’t know if it will be mentioned alongside the likes of Raging Bull in the years to come, but it deserves a spot in the conversation.