All you need is 15-love: on Challengers, a superb film about passion and tennis

(my latest Economic Times column, about one of my favourite films of the past year. And published just as Rafa Nadal – aged 38, back from his latest injury setback, ridiculously wins a 4-hour match against a much younger opponent; and then wins again the next day. Meanwhile, the robot who creates columnist pics for ET did one of me with a Nike shirt and a very oddly positioned tennis racquet - you can see that at the bottom of this post)------------

“Why are you so upset with me?” a man asks his girlfriend in one of those funny pictorial memes that are always doing the rounds. “There are 14 reasons why,” she spits back angrily, “Plus, your tennis obsession.”
“That’s 15, love,” he says with a goofy grin.

Tennis and love are the subjects of Luca Guadagnino’s brilliant Challengers, which I watched on the big screen earlier this year – and that’s the only way to watch it, to respect the kinetic, uninhibited energy of a movie that refuses to play it safe. You can call this a mashup of lush romantic drama, erotic thriller and sports movie about overvaulting ambition. Either way, it makes something like King Richard (about the early struggles of the Williams sisters and their dad) look even more ordinary, even insipid, than it already was.

But what is a “tennis film” exactly? Aren’t great real-world matches epic films too? I think so, having spent the last two decades obsessively watching men’s tennis, with my Rafael Nadal super-fandom as the fuel. A “favourite films of the year” list I made for 2022 included Nadal’s come-from-behind victory in the Australian Open final; it was the closest any recent “content” has brought me to jumping around excitedly, making tribal noises. (No feature film, whether made by Wim Wenders or Anees Bazmee, has had that effect.)

Watching Challengers – a story about the changing fortunes and personal relationships of three young tennis pros over a decade and a half – was a comparably visceral experience, thanks to the pace and boldness of the storytelling, the lead performances and the pulsating music score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. (An amusing but understandable phenomenon on recent Twitter tennis discussions: whenever someone shares a video of a great rally in a match, or something shot from an unusual angle, a bunch of people say it should be set to the Challengers score – or they do the required editing and re-post the clip.)

Spanning various incidents and encounters between 2006 and 2019, Challengers darts around like a time-traveling tennis ball; but chronologically speaking it begins with two teen friends, Patrick and Art, playing a doubles final together. (2006, incidentally, was also the year that Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray, still only 18, played doubles together at the Australian Open.) Patrick and Art are on the same side of the net, dependent on and trusting each other, as doubles partners (and close friends) must. Then their relationship with the talented Tashi (Zendaya) brings sexual jealousy and intrigue into the mix and leads them in opposite directions, personally and professionally. It might be said that the whole film is about the journey that leads to Patrick and Art getting back on the same side of the net (in a very different context) in a rousing final scene set 13 years later.

There are many ways of looking at the relationships that play out between these three. It would be easy to objectify Tashi by thinking of her as a symbolic ball moving between two men, but that would ignore her centrality in this story: she is manipulator and motivator, girlfriend, femme fatale and nurturing maternal figure all rolled into one, even before her own tennis career is cut short by a nasty injury.

Challengers seems to get that tennis love (whether you’re an active player or just a crazy spectator) can be as intense as romantic love, and as hormone-driven. It is about the things we do to each other in the heat of passion, how we volley feelings back and forth, go from defence to aggression (or vice versa) in the wink of an eye; about the convoluted journeys that both platonic and romantic love can take; the strategies and mind-games involved in negotiating intimacy and emotional dependence. It is a very sexy film, not because it has plenty of nudity or explicit sex scenes (it doesn’t) but for how it depicts the workings of attraction, and how fully its three leads throw themselves into doing this.

And yes, it’s about tennis too. As a metaphor, sure, with all that smashing and lobbing and sliding in every long rally; but also about the ebbs and flows of the sport. (The stars practiced long and hard with celebrated coach Brad Gilbert, to be convincing in those play scenes.) “It’s nice to see you lit up about something – even if that something is my girlfriend,” one of the friends says to the other, “It’s what’s been missing from your tennis.” And later, when a heavy-breathing dialogue in one of the film’s steamiest make-out scenes starts to become ambiguous, the guy asks “Are we talking about tennis?” and Tashi replies “We’re always talking about tennis.”