10. Challengers, dir. Luca Guadagnino
"I don't want to be a homewrecker" says Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) during the first pivotal moment between herself and her two boys. Challengers is a love triangle in structure, but let that line be a clue as to which relationship truly drives the plot. This movie about is about singles tennis - a game that can accommodate only two people on the court. Three people can fit on a bed, not in a tennis match, not in a marriage. Tashi is the prize fought between the mousy Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and the rat-faced Patrick Zweig (Josh O'Connor). This battle occurs during the course of their teens, twenties, and early thirties, or the beginning, middle, and end of their sports careers. Challengers describes tennis as a "relationship". In the end, it is only Art and Patrick on the court together. You might be doing this for the love of a girl, but the affair you must have is with your opponent.
The marketing of Challengers promised a lot more of a ménage à trois than the film actually delivers. There is only one scene of all three young people together in a crappy motel room, set during the steamy outro to the song "Uncle Ace" by Blood Orange. Tashi is controlling the lust of both young men, going from one set of lips to another until she finally pulls off her great magic trick: Patrick and Art making out, a tennis duo pushed over the line to a couple. We cut to Tashi with a Cheshire grin on her face, lying back and loving the sexual fantasy she conjured.
The whole movie is really a repeat of this trick. Tashi starts a family and brand with Art, while sleeping around mid-Nor'easter with Patrick. Art lives out every dream of a sports legend, Patrick is living out of a car and begging a small-stakes tournament assistant for half of her Dunkin' Donuts breakfast. One of them gets a huge poster outside, one of them is whoring himself out on dating websites for a place to sleep. It makes for a great evolving dynamic, shown non-linearly by Challengers. More and more moments of these relationships are shown to us, as Patrick goes from child prodigy to has-been, Art from sidekick to miserable champion. Tashi based between them, a living medium of exchange. And yet, even now, with both careers concluding in far less glory than either hoped, who is sitting in the middle? Who gets front seat tickets to the show?
We never see who wins the last match of Challengers. Art gets the final spike but also hit the net with his knee, so it depends on the ref's call here. (I've seen enough Mahomes' games to know how celebrity gets treated.) The stakes are made ludicrous by the plot: Tashi is basically put for wager, hard to imagine that will ever actually work out since she has a daughter and an entire business to run based on Art. Patrick believes rekindling things with his tennis genius ex-girlfriend will give him the edge he always lacked. It is equally hard to believe he'll bounce back considering his age and condition, no matter how half-cocked his smile is. We do not see a winner because the winning is irrelevant. Challengers is a sports movie that really is all about the game. This final sports climax brings something new out of these two men, something they have lacked since they were boys, a love of the competition and each other. Tashi is not cheering for either Art or Patrick, but for them both, who are too busy hugging to realize one of them won and one of them lost.
The final match brings something new out of Challengers. This is one of the best-shot sequences of the entire year. Director of Photography Sayombhu Mukdeeprom stages this match with every trick you could image: tennis ball POVs, digital camera moves to look down at the court, impossible shots from underneath the players, slow-motion. There's a lot of sweat dripping, and a lot of grunting. This is will not be the last time I mention Mukdeeprom this year. Also the edit is set to Trent Rezor and Atticus Ross's pounding techno score. (Do we have more great music from Reznor and Ross via soundtracks now than we do from Nine Inch Nails albums?) You're lifted up with the athletes to whatever magical moment they're having, as the past and future does not matter, just the beat of the ball bouncing, and the tension of the racket getting tighter and tighter.
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