Challengers is challenging.
Challengers is a 2 hour long film.
Challengers feels like a romantic drama masquerading as a niche subculture film, presented like a modern wink-at-the-audience film. Also, importantly, it probably could have been executed as a short, and this is not even accounting for the 20 minutes of slow motion footage that closed out the film.
First and foremost, does this need to be a tennis film–or more aptly put, a film set in the world of professional tennis? What did I learn about tennis and how was I moved by the coordinated themes of tennis and the plight of these characters? The answer to this question relates to the style and way in which the film was directed, but here’s a hint: Love is a big zero.
I never really believed anyone actually was a tennis player. Yes there were shots of balls hitting rackets, and Zendaya probably needed botox to unfurl her brow, so intently did she want us to believe in her stroke. So there was a lot of tennis going on but not really anything about tennis. There were people walking onto courts (single actions, shot from multiple angles for some reason); there were rackets and tennis clothing; there were nets and yellow balls; and courts with white lines. But aside from sun drenched canapés which staged our coifed friends, I’m not sure what was going on. I think I got a better sense of tennis from the 1 minute scene in Strangers on a Train, than I did here.
Again, this was not for lack of putting tennis on film, and certainly not for the filmmaker’s earnest desire for a sense of “reality.” In this film, reality, was executed with a nod at hyper-reality at every turn, and it took three primary forms.
On one hand we were consistently peppered with little facts and figures and information about professional tennis and there was lots of signage and graphics telling us where were and when. I can’t really remember if any of these instances were actually germane to the drama of the moment–or the scene–but most felt like informational throw-away lines. For example, I guess Zweig is ranked 271 in the world, and New Rochelle has some importance for qualifying. Also, serve velocity can be pinpointed and improved, and there are an unknown amount of violations and fouls allowed in a game; and oh yeah, some of the characters have or had nicknames pertaining to their tennis ability. The film made a real point of putting us in various arenas where tennis could be played. Practice courts, universities, professional tournaments, etc. Interesting. In sum total, tennis started to feel like a mauve day in someone’s apathetic life. I guess stuff mattered. I don’t know.
Additionally, there were cute script notes, that didn’t really have a dramatic role but almost served to wink at the audience–to make sure we were paying attention perhaps. The check-in clerk at one tournament was a former line judge at another tournament and recognizes Zweig. In the film’s jumpy timeline, we later see the earlier scene where she is in fact a line judge. I mean this is real shit here, and I felt comforted that the filmmaker tied up this loose end.
Lastly, often the camera was used in long takes, sometimes with an aggressive life of its own and other times a more refined player in a choreographed scene. The long take in my opinion, has one singular premise, to define reality by removing the most magical of film constructs, the cut. But there’s that word again, “reality.”
Most efforts at reality though seemed like efforts that got in the way of the story, and the filmmaker’s real intention, to seduce and titillate. Tennis, and rules of film language, and dramatic construct, really didn’t seem that important, and the effort to infuse the film with more extreme gestures, while intriguing, didn’t work for me. Were these two gonna go Brokeback or not? That’s all I wanted to know.
In the same way the film dressed up the sport with tricks and mis-direction, it treated the romantic drama in the same way. The film’s juggling of these elements, and roundly making characatures of the “players,” made me feel uncomfortable and tense for the duration of the film–something was going on that I was not privy to. I felt like I was overhearing a story about a weird Tinder date from people I couldn’t connect with in the first place, let alone a rendition of a moment in their life.
The film signals its gayness from the outset. It’s got a campy style to it, club music, and everyone is shot like a porn star. The subtle touch of the male umpire sounding like a woman, was particularly sublime at the outset. I appreciated this dramatic sexual tension. I don’t think the ubiquity of the sexual continuum gets enough play. There are a few scenes that stand out to me that are both interesting and messy, that I feel play into these ultimately competing motivations of telling a cohesive story and being excitable on a scene by scene basis. And again, if I’m the stuck up guy who just doesn’t “get it,” then so be it.
Somewhere towards the beginning of the film, at some sort of “tennis party,” Both the main tennis players, Art and Zweig flirt with the star player, Zendaya, or she flirts with them, or all tennis players act this way, I’m not sure. She agrees to go back to their hotel room (which by most standards is weird, and seemed to be a dramatic motivation loosely based on a reality I may not be so familiar with). None the less, this early on in the film, the love triangle still has tension hanging by a thread. The lighting and the odd looks of actors has me buying in. But it turns out she was actually testing their mettle and got her answer by seducing them or allowing them to seduce her. But her two suitors were just as content to make-out with each other as they were her. Was she an excuse for them to kiss each other? Or were they doing it to impress her? Or did she unlock something in them. We’ll never know, but this resolution to the scene was obvious and satisfying. It felt like a lot of dramatic playing dress-up to get here, but I could live with it. It felt like what was supposed to happen.
Sidebar: a couple of stand-out elements to this point that worked in concert with the story; I already mentioned the wonderful duplicitous introduction of the chair umpire. In the tennis scenes, Zendaya looks like an angry bitch mama. Her hair is short and badly coifed, her brow heavy, and her dress frumpy. When she is at the party, she looks young and sexually bubbly. When she approaches the hotel room it’s all legs and ass and in the hotel room we are enticed to explore her body further.
Anything shot this way can feel and look sexy and titilating. But what about tennis? or the drama? How is this conveyed? The filmmaker puts the camera in every conceivable position; perhaps just because or perhaps to eek out some meaning….Not an accurate count, but for the tennis playing alone, the camera is overhead, at court level, flying through the court, inside the ball, under the court, flying from overhead, perched in the stands, fisheye, and faux pov of both players simultaneously (which was actually an interesting concept). Was there a motivation to these shots or just brief snippets to fend off boredom?
I would later come to learn that this director and cinematographer come from the world of fashion and fragrance–you know, the quick 30 second hits filled with images perpetually out of reach but always nearly touchable. The film is filled with balls (tennis), and asses and legs and breasts and faces that are nice to look at–especially with the big hard light sources. But who am I to get sucked in to such banal human desires? I’m here to watch a film.
As I mentioned, the camera would be involved in several long takes, with the most obvious predicate being “reality.” It is an opportuntiy for the filmmaker to both define and play with reality; this interlude provided to the viewer is an important one, and seems to rely in part on the relationship between the style of the material before and after. Some examples in other work are the opening to Touch Of Evil, which ultimately feels ostentatious, despite itself, or Scorsese’s various tricks of the trade. Then there is the low budget/I don’t know where to put the camera follow style (insert example here), and an even a more intended experience of reality like Birdman. So where do the long take shots fit in Challengers?
On the tennis court, the camera moves from character to character without a cut, in a desire to preserve and accelerate tension. In probably the director’s piece de resistance, sex and tennis get fully jumbled in a bedroom scene between Zendaya and Zweig. This is scene is wonderfully staged, and begs to be rewatched. But in the end, I have no idea what’s going on and I’m spending most of my time watching their bodies with a “will they or won’t they” dramatic tension. It’s a great example of how confused this film gets when it comes to actually telling a story by combining a camera and actors. In this single take, the film best expresses it’s confusion about what it is, what it hopes to be, and what the hell is going on, all with a deft point of view. However, I bet if taken separately, simply the beautiful staging OR the dialogue (I’ll leave the actual acting and directing the actor alone here), we would have something more meaningful. So instead of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts, it may be the opposite sort of equation.
This film is filled with strikingly confrontational framings and scene structure. The style is both very self assured and confusing. As with the previous long take scene, the multi-shot varieties, have an internal filmmaking conflict to them–like the camera is stepping on the actors’ lines. As an audience member, what I am supposed to pay attention to or learn or be moved by?
Take the scene in which Zweig and Art eat churros in a school cafeteria(?) (the whole timeline and locations of Stanford among others still escapes me). The scene has a brilliant early shot in close-up, of Zweig moving the open stool closer to him before Art sits down, leaving Art no choice but to be intimately placed with Zweig. This at once feels powerful. We know who’s scene it is and what he wants. But it’s the combination of the action with shot choice that makes for a sort of disharmonious reality. The move of the chair is decisive AND the shot is decisive in the same way. It feels like we are being shown something and then immediately asked, “did you get that? Here let me repeat myself.” The scene goes on with the extreme close-ups, and the two actors sitting impossibly close, the willful sexuality of the actors just begging for more. But alas, the desires can’t resolve themself and this surreptitious jaunt into to forbidden intimacy must end unrequited, and the two trade the churros for tennis bags and resume their lives of tennis on opposite sides of the net. But wait, this is just a visual reading of the film based on staging. What about what the actors are saying or the way in which they are saying it or what came before or after to lend us some larger dramatic stakes or conflict? That’s where I am of no use. I have no idea what’s going. I have no idea what’s going on in the larger sense but in various bite size pieces, I am intrigued.
The film’s structure chooses to jump back and forth and in and out of different periods of the life of these characters. I guess any time a film does this my question is why? does it add to the drama? In D.O.A. it does. In Interstellar, it probably does too. Here it could, but I don’t think it does. I think a reason to do this is to jolt each segment with a dose of dramatic energy; to imbue the dramatic stakes of each character with something larger. On a cursory reading two tennis loving boys grow up and turn pro, one loves tennis but lacks greatness, and the other loves love more than tennis, but happens to be great. And oh yeah, there’s a girl who tests them throughout for both their lovemaking and tennis playing. She’s given up on love but not tennis, though she’d like to have both, but in tennis love equals zero. Zweig is the “challenger,” Art is the champion, Zendaya is the coach/provocateur.
There is that fateful night mentioned earlier, where both Art and Zweig hit on Zendaya, Art presumably for love, Zweig presumably for sex, Zendaya for cheap thrills. It’s my guess that Zendaya’s character is older and more established at this point? and the two boys are, well, just that. The film then presents various scenes in various order, and we learn that Zweig is down and out, but yet still a professional tennis player always threatening greatness, but Zendaya thinks his claws are clipped. Art and Zendaya are married with a child, which no matter how many times I see Art and Zendaya and the baby and the grandmother, I can’t help to think it’s a random casting session I’ve walked in on. Art is a real tennis player making real money and Zendaya is pushing for every next penny. He resents this. Does she love him just for his money making racket? She seems never satisfied. She doesn’t love him and he knows it. They both blame Zweig. The film takes a fair amount of effort, both with mise en scene and dialogue, to let us know that Zweig has a big racket, and they don’t appreciate it. He eats churros and bananas seductively in seductive framing, he stands crotch high right in front of his friends, and he’s not afraid to show skin. Apparently this all makes him a threat and a magnet. But what does Zweig want? Zendaya? Fame? Art? all three, like in the first scene? In the end, after a final plea for Zendaya to come to the dark side results in her unleashing her womanly breasts in a long slow motion tracking shot, they all must choose. Zweig gets one final night with Zendaya, but in exchange he must throw the match with Art. He must die so Art can live. But in the end, either through spite or through love, Zweig must take one for himself. By inciting rage within Art, he gets him to come right into his arms. As for the match? eh, well this never was about tennis.
I guess my takeaway is if the sexual dynamic between the two leads is so obvious to me, and played up over and over again by the filmmaker, then why is Zendaya so angry? Does she really want to coach the best tennis player in the world that badly? Then wouldn’t the intricacies of tennis be more well defined? Why is Zendaya sleeping with Zweig at the end in exchange for him giving up (though we’ve seen no evidence of his tennis prowess) such an intriguing prospect for Zweig? Is he that ruthless in pursuit of his goal that he will take Art any way he can get him, even in anger. And what is Zendaya so pissed about at the end? Because she lost both of them to each other? Even though she seemed to have disdain for the love of one and the tennis ability of the other. I like the largeness of the story arc. It’s very mythological. But I’m not sure that the story really exists on film. Yes, I realize I just recited it. But is it really there? Does it really matter? It’s all very meta these days.
The film’s final moments, I do feel speaks volumes about this film. At the direction of the female lead (the love interest and interested coach, the challenger (who should be a champion), sets up the champion (who will only ever be a challenger), to crush the winning shot . But while taking the bait he falls right into the challengers arms. This shot, set up with “impossible” camera angles, breaks all laws of tennis and gravity. He literally jumps over the net and strikes the ball on the other player’s side of the court. So, yeah, on one hand this image embodied the central through-line of the characters, but not in relation to the film that got us here. This sequence, almost entirely in slow motion (or at least that’s how it felt), finally admitted we weren’t supposed to be caring about tennis at all. Then why waste our time? Just make a short film; or better yet, a fashion ad…Something under a minute or two would probably do.
If you like a film about sports and sexual identity go watch Personal Best. If you are into something about two girls and one guy and friendship gone awry, try Jules and Jim. If it’s about pent up homosexuality, try the aforementioned Brokeback Mountain or maybe even Fight Club or Face Off, viewed through a certain lens. And if you just want to eat some junk food, I point you to the David Leitch discography. However, what if this film was part of a new movement of film storytelling? I went and reproached Breathless, with this in mind. The more I looked, the more I think the filmmakers were fundamentally attracted to the idea rule-less based cinema; as if somehow through shear tormenting of the camera by our good-looking stars, and the swings cinematic rapture of the shot selections the story would manifest itself in the audience–like a wisp of perfume in the night. I fear here, though, without the romantic streets of Paris, and a particular emotional grounding, Challengers eats itself at every turn and lacks a logic. There’s a logic to individual scenes and a logic to the script, but not so much once all the elements come together. But alas, this isn’t all that uncommon in the consumption for the many; there is something awry when a project moves from the page to the screen.
Here though, it seems the desires to seduce through a overt combination of sexual innuendo and camera ideas inspired by YouTube (metaphorically of course), are effective enough to excite some for moments, and some films like this are dressed up so cleverly (and exhaustingly) that they pass as Art or love or Zweig. Behold content creator cinema, aka short attention span celluloid, aka a story without resolution, aka a match without a winner; only challengers.