David Foster Wallace once wrote that “TV tennis is to live tennis pretty much as video porn is to the felt reality of human love.”
A dramatic analogy, but hard to dispute if you’ve ever seen world-class tennis in person. Something about the game’s speed and intensity, when played at an elite level, does not survive the compression into two dimensions, as is surely the case with almost any sport.
“Challengers,” the new film by acclaimed director Luca Guadagnino, narrows that gulf. It gets closer than probably any other movie about professional tennis (which admittedly is not many) to evoking the sensation of being courtside: the players’ superhuman quickness, the buckets of sweat, the gunshot sound of a ball leaving the strings, the violent chemistry of a perfect match.
Guadagnino may have spent time pondering that pornography/love comparison, because “Challengers” is not only the sexiest film about tennis (again, not much competition) but must be one of the most erotically charged sports movies ever made.
It follows a complicated relationship that unfolds among three players across two decades. At the beginning of the film, Tashi (Zendaya), an ex-collegiate phenom, is coaching her husband Art, an aging Grand Slam champion hoping to make a career-capping US Open run.
While slumming at a Challenger event (basically the minor leagues of pro tennis), the power couple crosses paths with Patrick (Josh O’Connor), a fading journeyman player. The trio evidently has a shared history, but initially our only clues are written in the wounded looks they exchange.
In the first of several flashbacks to the 2000s, we learn Art and Patrick were lifelong friends and junior champions. At a tournament they meet Tashi, a top women’s prospect, follow her to a party and convince her to visit their dingy hotel room, where … stuff happens.
What follows is a love triangle whose configuration shifts as each player’s tennis life unfolds. Both guys have the hots for Tashi, but also possibly each other. Tashi opts to play college tennis while dating Patrick, who is distracted by life on the men’s tour. Tashi has a career-ending knee injury, swaps guys and masters the business end of the game.
By 2019 — for unclear reasons, our version of the present day — both male players are on the verge of walking away, Art after a distinguished career and a period of decline, Patrick after a few too many years of squandered potential spent sleeping in his car outside tennis venues.
When they meet in the finals, all three have something huge at stake, no matter how small-potatoes the tournament. Will Art regain his spark and close his career on a high note? Will Tashi leave her comfortable marriage for the heat of an old flame? Will the two guys finally resolve their unambiguous homoerotic tension?
The soap-opera stuff is diversionary, sometimes confusing as the timeline hops around and ultimately secondary to what happens in the climatic match, which delivers easily the most electrifying tennis ever put on film.
Set to a pulse-pounding electronic-music score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the game unfolds from unusual perspectives — sometimes from the ball’s point of view, sometimes from below as if the court were made of glass, always kinetic and brutal.
Guadagnino, working from a script by Justin Kuritzkes, presents the confined geometry of a tennis court as both an extension of the characters’ psycho-sexual drama and a magnificent canvas for its resolution: the place where the real action happens.
That Wallace quote about tennis and sex is from a famous essay he wrote about Roger Federer, but which actually addresses something larger: how pro sports sometimes facilitate the expression of a beauty that transcends the limitations of living in a human body.
Likewise, a perfect tennis match, the film argues, reconciles the immortalizing possibilities of athleticism with the tragic physical reality of decay. In the best of circumstances, it ends with a hug; “Challengers” suggests another climax entirely.