Whole-court Coverage – Challengers film review
By Peter Searles
One of the opening scenes of Challengers depicts an unusual domestic scene. Art Donaldson is working out in his apartment living room while a sports physio inspects his body like a mechanic fine-tuning an engine. Art’s wife and coach, Tashi, watches news coverage of her husband’s recent losing streak in the ATP Tour while making adjustments to draft copy of an Aston Martin billboard advertisement featuring the two of them. There’s a child somewhere in the background. More unidentified people hover around. It reads like a marketing business with an attached nanny service, run from a penthouse apartment. But this is a normal day for the Donaldsons; a family in which tennis is an enduring feature of, if not the driving force behind, every human relationship.
Challengers centres around the years-long love triangle between Art, Tashi and Patrick (Art’s childhood friend and fellow tennis prodigy). In that opening scene, Art is asked directly by Tashi, “what do you want?” and in response he holds out his hand to his wife. This is the last time any of the three primary characters will clearly express their core desires. As the film goes on, what these characters want turns out to be complex and (rewardingly for the viewer) hidden beneath layers of subtext.
While Art has enjoyed years of recognition as one of the world’s top players, we are introduced to Patrick as he is living out of his car, scrounging for money to enter the second-tier of global tennis competition – the ATP Challenger Tour. Art’s losing streak has led to a crisis of confidence that threatens his position. To rediscover his mojo, he agrees to step back into the Challenger Tour where he is sure to sail through to an easy victory. When Art and Patrick inevitably face off in the Challenger Tour final, it opens the narrative doors to an exploration of their friendship and the thirteen-year romantic entanglement they’ve had with the same woman.
The dual focus of a love triangle and sporting competition might not sound like a recipe for breaking new cinematic ground. But there are a few things that set the film apart from others it might be compared with. Most significantly, its visual style. Global attention has come to the Italian Director Luca Guadagnino, in particular for his films Call Me by Your Name and Suspiria, but Challengers might be his first film to bear the imprint of a unique artistic vision.
There is a continual jumping back and forth between realism and sexy, stylised images. The latter are pushed to the most ambitious extremes in the depiction of action on-court. If you’ve ever been to a major tournament tennis match, you will have seen the camera that hangs above the court, suspended by a system of wires that allows it to move every which way, capturing each point for TV coverage. Challengers often feels like it was shot using a similar rig, but one with the enhanced freedom to fly into the spectators’ seats, then back on court to hover millimetres from the players’ sweating faces, or descend all the way to ground level and below. Watching the film at a late-night screening at Dendy, I was glad to be in a mostly empty theatre so no one could see me flinching when it felt as though the ball would hit me square in the face. But the apparent determination to consider every possible angle of coverage extends to scenes off the court too. When a simple conversation is a mish-mash of standard shots and extreme high and low angle close ups, it keeps the viewer on alert, an effect that is multiplied by another stand-out element – the music.
Starting with The Social Network in 2010, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have collaborated on several film scores for Director David Fincher, and others. Challengers is the first Guadagnino film to feature the duo’s heaving, acid-house sound, which goes unsurprisingly well with the fast pace of the on-court scenes. What’s less expected is the way the score invades scenes of dialogue, crashing in mid-conversation and hanging around, threatening to drown out the actors’ voices. As with the ambitious cinematography, the score is being used to heighten emotion in ways we’re not used to. It all builds viewer engagement to levels worthy of a grand slam final.
But nowhere is the film more in line with its subject matter than when it comes to corporate sponsorship. Besides the Aston Martin billboard, I saw ads for Fila, Coke, Sprite, Uni Qlo, Adidas, Wilson, Nike, Apple, even Camel cigarettes. It’s one of many reasons you can imagine this film was an easy sell to the production studio. And yet somehow all the advertising manages to pass itself off as a critique or satirical comment on the sporting industry and not just shameless fundraising (which of course it is).
Ultimately Challengers is a success because the heavy-handed visual and sonic tricks contribute thematic weight to a good story with nuanced characters, while the game of tennis itself is wrung for every drop of metaphoric meaning in support of the drama. Like the camera and players zipping around the court, the film offers complete coverage of the characters’ complex relations. We are trusted to conclude for ourselves what games are really being played.