Love is a Losing Game
A brief three-way close-up sequence opens Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers (2024), eliminating any expectations that this is an ordinary two-player tennis game.
It’s halfway through the summer of 2019, and the game to watch is the finals of a Challenger event situated in Phil’s Tire Town Country Club in New Rochelle, New York, where renowned tennis player Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) is competing against the lesser-known Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor).
As the pair go through their first few — relatively strong — rallies, a noticeable figure sitting in the front row of the audience consistently catches the attention of both players, sparking a sense of friction and hinting that there’s more at stake in this game than meets the eye.
The curious figure is Tashi Donaldson (Zendaya), Art’s wife. Previously a highly acclaimed young tennis athlete, an injury forced Tashi to retire on the cusp of going pro. In the present day, her attention seems devoted to the game, yet her gaze shifts back and forth from her husband to his competitor. Each time Tashi makes eye contact with one of them, the other studies the silent interaction across the court, indicating a complicated history intertwining all three of them.
Through a nonlinear narrative, the film unveils the layers of Tashi, Art, and Patrick’s shared (and unshared) history, and how it leads them to that final match at Phil’s Tire Town. Justin Kuritzkes’s screenplay takes the audience through retrospectives as far as over a decade before that summer’s day and as recent as the night before, all the while intermittently bringing our attention back to the match, the tension becoming more visible with each return to the present.
All of this is supported by cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s ability to make the optics of the film its own experience.
It’s safe to say we rarely see tennis through a lens like this. While broadcasted tennis matches commonly use overhead shots, capturing most of the game from a safe distance, the points of view in the Art v. Patrick match become more and more diverse over time, gradually diminishing personal space to reveal the secrets and motives of the characters one by one.
There’s a lot of movement to take in, and it might be due to Guadagnino’s interest in dynamism and how to capture that visually in this film. Mukdeeprom’s cinematography achieves this vision brilliantly. A combination of unique shots (if you know, you know) is paramount in making the audience feel immersed within the game, and by extension, the film.
The concept of immersion is not foreign in the sports world. Focus, muscle memory, and flow are some of the terms that tell us how much of sports is a mind game and require a significant amount of practice to achieve a certain level of automaticity — as shown in the film where both Art and Patrick have incorporated certain instinctive movements in their routines as players.
For Tashi, tennis itself is completely automatic to her. It is an entity that is hitched to her identity. “Tennis is a relationship,” she said, as an attempt to mirror the sport to reality. The back-and-forth action and reaction between its players are made to feel like symbiosis — a love reciprocated. But the question becomes, how does this “mutual love” manifest in the relationship between Tashi, Art, and Patrick?
Because in the sport where the word “love” itself signifies the score of zero, who is the real winner here?
