Challengers Review
The edging ethos of modern life
By the 1970s when film scholars were reinterpreting the social and aesthetic significance of the melodramas of Hollywood’s Golden Age, the seismic shift towards visual realism had already begun. John Cassavetes’ “A Child is Waiting” is a perfect amalgamation of this early schism; aesthetic realism bullied by an overbearing saccharine score that feels reminiscent of a fading kind of cinematic emotional modality. Before World War II, The United States had about a dozen military bases around the world, mostly in its colonized territories. In the 80 years since, that number has gone up to 750 in at least 80 sovereign countries. The slow decline into perpetual war has made the idea of a postwar cinema both foreign and aspirational. It is in this milieu that the Hollywood melodrama has vanished, bastardized with few exceptions into soap operas and trite Oscar winners that tend to quickly fray with age.
The first and final scenes of Luca Guadagnino’s “Challengers" are of a single tennis match that also plays over the course of the entire film. Although the film’s structure is technically not linear, its narrative is. The film’s tensions and shifting upper hands are structurally built into the splicing of the match’s sets. It is a ubiquitous melodrama in that it appeals to “our melancholic sense of the loss of origin”[1]. The narrative centers on the circumstances that lead to the final of eponymous tournament, increasing the stakes with sordid secrets that turn out not to be secrets at all. At the beginning of the film, you already know the end of the story. Former tennis star Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) post career ending injury is coaching her tennis star husband Art Donaldson (Mike Faist). He faces Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), long time failson and somewhat former lover of both him and Tashi in the final of a small town competition.
The thing about love triangles is that someone is always going to feel like they’re not in on the joke. Art knows this; after he loses to Patrick in the game for Tashi’s number he begs for information about their date by saying; “I’m very happy for you, I just don’t wanna feel left out.” They proceed to create an inside joke that later returns to make Tashi the outsider. It happens to all three characters in the film. When Patrick tells Tashi that Art is to her, only “a dick and a racket,” he's projecting because he isn’t privy to the intimacy- fractured as it may be- of their home life. The volley of dramatic irony between the different pairings of characters, as well as the aversion to all the very clear simple solutions to their dilemmas are effectively made more exhilarating by the striking under the court shots and frantic tennis ball POV shots.
Admittedly, “Challengers” is about tennis in the sense that it is about where you find yourself when a shift happens. It's a film very literally centered around dynamics and the willingness to meet circumstance with what Art so dizzyingly calls “swagger” in a sauna scene where Patrick congratulates him on making the final. It's a scene that perfectly demonstrates the director’s knack for melodrama; a naked Patrick walks in on Art with an air of presumptuous friendliness, Art tells him to put his dick away. As Art establishes that he has no patience for indulgence, he assumes the moral superiority in the scene and is framed as such, hovering above Patrick as they discuss who should be more embarrassed to be at the tournament they are both at. Nonetheless this visual dynamic feels somewhat false, and the film in fact tells us so by cutting in scenes of Patrick and Tashi’s affairs. But another shift yet, Art’s knowledge of the affairs is also insinuated. This strict visual gag reappears constantly throughout the film; namely when Tashi pretends to give Art an out after he loses to a young up and comer, she’s framed to be standing above him, or the infamous split diopter shot during the final match. There is an inherent precarity to the emotional leverage presented in every composition.
The sauna scene is full of pointed dramatic irony; that Art and Patrick’s coldest, most emotionally withdrawn interaction takes place in a hot steamy room, that Art storms out and claims he’s too old for bisexuality. And ultimately the relationship between Art and Patrick is the one we crave the most. It is assiduously lamented with playful wrestling on the court and insane close ups [2]. There is no real playfulness in either of their relationship with Tashi, she is the stoic Lauren Bacall to their respective Rock Hudson and Robert Stack; the very serious thing that arrives to end a very naive thing. Like in "Written on The Wind," the reckless heir gets the girl first; and the dutiful best friend remains in the background playing “percentage tennis.” Tashi calling herself a homewrecker effectively recenters the narrative to Guadagnino’s thematic priority; the picture of the perfect modern nuclear family.
As the most palpable representation of the bourgeois social order (no, not tennis), the stability of the nuclear family functions as a high stake in the melodramas of Sirk, Ray, Logan et al. The genre’s masochistic display of emotions and excessive spectacle is all in service of the relationship between the characters and the social conditions they find themselves in. The best contemporary reimaginations of classic genres tend to complicate a seemingly unmovable condition of said genre in a way that grounds it in a specific historical context. While it is true that “Challengers” is a story about a precarious family unit navigating interpersonal conflict in the midst of changing sociosexual dynamics, it is also a sort of love story that traces the identity crisis of a spoiled whining aristocrat type struggling with the expectations of male adulthood. The film complicates the seemingly established roles of wife and mother, of husband and man with an athletic sexless eros, choosing to lean into the very contemporary modality of edging. It is the first post Anne Carson film, a perfect marriage of male and female weepies for the contemporary audience, if “Design for Living” was “Raging Bull” and it was directed by a gay man.
The characters are not so much realized human beings as they are ideas, markers of a certain type of person. As a picture of a society obsessed with types, “Challengers” focuses on the ways reality constantly interrupts our self perceptions. The prodigy athlete relegated to coaching by an injury, the rich kid with a romantic penchant for roughing it, and the mediocre “good” guy who wants to kiss his best friend’s ex are the extent of these characters internality, and they manage to sustain the light narrative because, of course, of Guadagnino and cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s camera but also because of the performances. Faist is nefariously docile, begging to be pitied and rarely succeeding. O’Connor is giving a movie star performance reminiscent of pre code Gary Cooper. Zendaya delivers her lines as if they were directives, and yet manages to dole out enough believable vulnerability to make the character work [3].
That very Sirkian windswept kiss washed in the red light of Patrick’s beat up SUV is the closest a non-tennis scene wanders into the formal artifice of the matches. Between the stylized performances, the thumping score, and disruptive compositions, the only substantial presence of realism remains off the court. The hotel lobbies so pallid they don’t appear to have been dressed for filming at all and the visible real brands peppered throughout establish an aseptically familiar world.
Although critics have faulted the score's disproportionate impact on the film’s tone, I find it nonsensical to berate a melodrama’s heavy-handed use of music. Stylized naturalism is part of what made 50s melodramas so distinct; and they are a great reminder of the formal possibilities of popular cinema. “Challengers” with its austere architecture, its pulsive commercial score and Uniqlo sponsored marriages erects recognizable markers of contemporary American life; an idealized presentation of our social reality. Where Todd Haynes’ melodramas feel like a studied homage to Sirk, Challengers is an explicitly contemporary derivative.
If Sirk’s melodrama was reacting to the increased tension between the sphere of production (work life) and the sphere of reproduction (home life) caused by industrialization, Guadagnino’s contemporary take is a reaction to the clunky integration of the former into the latter caused by globalization. “Challengers” leverages a stylized narrative attitude against the pastiche of contemporary desire; where the self is a product refined by a victimization ethos. Tati fucking a guy after telling him to kill himself and pretending its for her marriage, Art’s impotence as self appointed penance, Patrick’s poverty cosplay and general lack of grasp on reality; are all problems created by the need to return to a crystalized self that was always being betrayed by the actual self.
At its core, the melodrama is a fantasy of the quest for connection where encounters happen too late. The film's final moments is a deus ex machina embrace between Art and Patrick that arouses an allusionary roar in Tashi. We don’t really know who wins; the match or the girl. Just like the Sirk films; it's as happy an ending as Hollywood can muster.
[1] Linda William’s definition in Film Bodies
[2] Patrick bringing Art’s stool closer to him with his foot! Inspired!
[3] The scene where Zendaya realizes her career is over, when she leans against a tree and lets go of that version of herself, it brought to mind again Film Bodies. Linda Williams quotes Italian critic Frank Moretti. “We cry, Moretti argues, not just because the characters do, but at the precise moment when desire is finally recognized as futile.”