[COLUMN] In Challengers, Love is a Game of Winners and Losers | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Challengers, which is great. If you want to see it unspoiled, you can bookmark the piece and come back later.

“You don’t know what tennis is,” Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) explains to Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O'Connor) on the night that they meet, after an amateur tennis tournament. The boys are convinced that tennis is a game, but Tashi has a deeper understanding of the sport. “It’s a relationship.”

Challengers is built around this central metaphor. The bulk of the movie unfolds against the backdrop of a tennis match between Art and Patrick years later, interspaced with flashbacks to their evolving relationships with Tashi. The match pivots along with the memories. Patrick takes an early lead as he seduces Tashi on their first encounter, but Art pulls ahead in the later sets as the flashbacks reveal that Tashi ultimately chose to marry him and to raise a child with him.

In their last conversation as boyfriend and girlfriend, before an injury that literally cuts off Tashi’s professional career at the knees, Tashi teases Patrick about the fact that his best friend Art is obviously attracted to her. She hopes that Patrick will rise to the challenge that Art represents. “Are we still talking about tennis?” Patrick asks as they make out furiously on her bed. Tashi responds, simply, “We’re always talking about tennis.” Hitting the winning shot in an early match against Anna Mueller (Emma Davis), Tashi screams “come on!” in a manner that Art correctly identifies as orgasmic. To Tashi, tennis is everything – and everything is tennis.

Challengers is the latest film from Luca Guadagnino. If Guadagnino can be said to have a thematic obsession, it is with the idea of love. Promoting his remake of Suspiria, the filmmaker noted that his previous three films -  I Am Love, A Bigger Splash, and Call My By Your Name – spoke “physically of love, passion, and desire.” After his “trilogy of desire”, Suspiria seemed like a sharp left turn, a remake of a classic Italian horror. However, Guadagnino argues, “Horror is the closest thing to love.”

Guadagnino would test this idea with Bones and All, the cannibal love story that he directed between Suspiria and Challengers. Bones and All is a truly remarkable film, an achingly sincere love story nestled inside a viscerally upsetting and graphically violent horror story. In Bones and All and arguably in Suspiria, Guadagnino posits that love is an act of violence. It is all-consuming. In the worlds of these movies, to love somebody is to devour them and to swallow them whole.

Challengers is not a horror. Its violence is largely emotional. However, it is recognizably of a piece with the rest of Guadagnino’s films. New Yorker staff writer Nathan Heller argues that Guadagnino’s “movies are haunted by betrayals of and by the body, and then by their effect on the elaborating and evasive efforts of the mind.” This is very true for Tashi Duncan, who suffers a knee injury at the start of her professional career, which has a profound impact on the lives of the movie’s three leads.

Tashi is an ambitious young woman, who has built her life around tennis. When Art wonders what Tashi will do in the wake of that injury, she admits, “Unfortunately, my only skill in life is hitting a ball with a racket.” It’s clear from the movie’s opening scenes that Art’s stalled professional career is largely a way to vicariously afford Tashi the life that she always thought she deserved. “I’m playing for both of us, Tashi,” Art admits, in the midst of a downward spiral that threatens to derail his shot at the Grand Slam.

If Bones and All suggests that love is quite literally all-consuming, then Challengers posits love as a competition. On their first night together, refusing to be a “homewrecker” between the two life-long friends, Tashi offers a proposal. Art and Patrick are playing in the amateur final the following day, and whoever wins will get her number. Patrick has always been a more natural competitor and a more aggressive player, so he handily defeats Art.

The relationship between the three leads is a tug-of-war. However, it isn’t just Patrick and Art competing for Tashi’s affection. There’s a none-too-subtle implication that Patrick and Art share a sublimated sexual desire for one another. The two celebrate victory by mounting one another and throwing each other to the ground. Patrick remembers how the two met at boarding school, teaching Art how to masturbate. As the trio make out together on the bed, Tashi pulls back. She watches with pride as Patrick and Art continue kissing with only the slightest encouragement.

The implication is that Tashi is not the first woman to come between the two boys. If anything, she is a catalyst rather than a cause. Remembering that night on the boarding school beds, Art recalls that the pair were fantasizing about the same girl, a fellow student. When Tashi asks whether anything ever happened involving the object of their shared fantasy, Art explains, “She got injured a week later.” This neatly foreshadows Tashi’s own accident. It seems that history has a way of repeating itself. Tashi is perhaps just another fantasy caught between these two young men.

Art seems unsure how to navigate this, while Patrick seems more aware of the dynamic. When the two grab lunch to talk about Patrick’s relationship to Tashi, Patrick playfully bites at Art’s churro. Browsing Tinder while looking for a place to spend the night, Patrick swipes right on men. His trademark shot involves swinging the racket between his legs. In the present day, Patrick tries to get under Art’s skin by confronting him naked in the hotel sauna and later by suggestively eating a banana in a break between sets. Patrick’s greater degree of comfort with the sexual chemistry between the two men perhaps reflects his competitive nature.

Both Tashi and Patrick are inherently competitive. Early in the film, Tashi approves a publicity campaign from a sponsor, featuring herself and Art. She measures the size of their faces on the advertisement to ensure true equity. She corrects the copy from “Game Changer” to “Game Changers”, positioning herself as a true equal to Art. When Patrick shows up to the movie’s central competition, even though he’s broke, he refuses to throw a match for an easy pay-out.

Indeed, the teenage romance between Patrick and Tashi even serves to ignite a sense of competition in the usually easy-going Art. At tennis camp, Patrick quickly identifies Art’s jealousy. “It’s nice to see you lit up about something – even if it’s my girlfriend,” Patrick chides his best friend. “It’s what’s been missing from your tennis.” This dynamic clearly excites all three participants, and pushes them to compete and excel. Blood is pumping. Adrenaline is flowing.

There is obviously a very heavy sexual subtext to all of this, to the point that Challengers has become the “sexy tennis movie.” The film’s marketing leans heavily on this. As ever, Guadagnino is a director fascinated by physical expressions of desire. However, it would be reductive to describe Challengers as a movie that literalizes the competitive nature of sexual selection. As with Guadagnino’s other films, Challengers isn’t just about sex. It is about love.

Love comes up repeatedly in Challengers, as the three leads attempt to navigate their complicated feelings for one another. Trying to sabotage her young relationship with Patrick, Art warns her, “He’s not in love with you.” Tashi responds almost confrontationally, “What makes you think I want somebody to be in love with me?” Years later, on the eve of the match that provides the spine of the movie, Art admits to Tashi, “I love you.” She responds simply, “I know.”

Challengers wonders whether Tashi is capable of love, and how such love would express itself. It’s a remarkable performance from Zendaya, fresh off Dune: Part Two. Does Tashi love Art or simply see him as a vehicle through which she can fulfil her own ambitions? Is Tashi’s desire to see Art win anchored in her need to be married to a winner or in her husband’s need to feel like a winner? When Tashi reaches out to ask Patrick to throw the match, is it a twisted act of love, pity, or selfishness – or some combination of the three? The movie leaves the answers to these questions ambiguous.

The struggles between the three leads in Challengers establish a sort of shifting hierarchy, with each seeking to prove their worth to themselves and to the others. One of the film’s central recurring visuals finds Tashi sitting between Patrick and Art, assessing and judging her “two white boys.”  She turns her head and shines her favor on one, then the other. These competitions represent a way of asserting one’s value. Indeed, Tashi organized the movie’s central tennis match in the hopes an easy victory would give Art an easy self-esteem boost.

Challengers captures the tension between two competing and very recognizable human emotions: the desire to prove oneself worthy of the love of the object of one’s affection and the paradoxical hope that such love might be offered without qualification. On the eve of the big match against Patrick, Art curls up on the bed and rests his head in Tashi’s lap. He asks her to tell him that she will still love him, even if he loses. “If you don’t win tomorrow, I’ll leave you,” she responds, honestly.

However, in such a competitive dynamic, none of the players can ever be truly equal. One of the film’s recurring motifs is the idea that the three characters are “peers.” Patrick’s relationship with Tashi hits the rocks when she attempts to manage him, and then asks him to attend her match. “I’m your peer,” he protests. “I’m not your groupie, and I’m certainly not your fucking student.” Years later, in the sauna, Art notes that Patrick presumes to talk to him as “a peer” because they “came from the same place.”

Tennis is oddly suited to this exploration of love as a competitive sport, even beyond Guadagnino’s trademark kinetic visual style that leads to neat tricks like Faist sweating so heavily that he blurs the lens or the decision to shoot one set from the perspective of the tennis ball. The nature of professional tennis makes it impossible for a match to end in a draw, as demonstrated by the mockumentary Seven Days in Hell. There must be a winner and there must be a loser.

However, tennis is also a sport where love means zero.