Challengers: Tennis Out of Context
Luca Guadagnino's film as mainstream queer intervention into men's tennis
Tennis is a lonely sport. That is a statement repeated over and over by tennis fans, casual and serious, pundits, reporters, and current and former players. You are alone out there facing big serves and massive forehands. You sit by yourself in the chair during changeovers. “Nobody to help you, you have to problem solve yourself and figure out a way to win the next point”. “She returned from the bathroom break and played at a higher level; what did she say to herself.” Tennis historically takes pride in operating on this desolate island. Only recently has the sport become comfortable to give up its cast away status, allowing coaching from the stands even though everyone knows it’s been happening forever. And almost always, when people talk about this, they are talking of singles tennis and almost always they fail to mention it.
Early in Luca Guadagnino’s latest film Challengers, we see Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) playing at the 2006 US Open. They are a team in the boys’ junior doubles final, and Patrick is serving. Art is at the net giving him the usual hand signal—where to serve and whether Art is ready to poach or stay his ground. Patrick looks at Art’s couched butt and smiles. They are teenagers who grew up together. They warm up together, practice together, play together and get each other just right. They win. They are not pros yet on the tennis tour. But players spend a lot of time together the world over and these two have been at it all their lives. They are not lonely; they are always trying to find each other every step of the way. It’s essentially the film’s leitmotif, Challengers—written by Justin Kuritzkes—breaks the notion that tennis is a lonely sport.
For Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), the feral tennis prodigy, tennis is love in its highest form between players on opposite sides of the court—fleeting, momentous and beautiful. Art and Patrick fall in love together. With her tennis. With her. Singles players often practice against two opponents on the other side to push their movement and stamina. It does not make sense outside of practice and in Challengers, Tashi is like a fault line in the more symmetrical geometry of tennis. She uses the word homewrecker but only in the final moment of the film do we realize her one true wish. The wish of every serious tennis fan.
Guadagnino’s roving eye captures this kinetic film with chaotic energy that is in constant search for its protagonist. Like tennis, it is not happy with a single hero, it is constantly looking to topple one and crown another with friendships, rivalries and characters abound. The camera moves with calculated purpose, from one player on the chair during changeover, hopping over the umpire at a higher ground and dropping in on the other player in his chair. Sometimes it is point of view shots. Or we take a ride with the ball. There is a delicious oner in Stanford dormitory from Patrick getting out of the bathroom, hopping on to bed, making out with Tashi, breaking into a fight, Tashi laying the floor mat for warmup, Patrick leaving the room ending with a zoom in on Tashi’s face registering the gravity of a moment that will affect all three lives. A veritable tapestry of the vacillating dynamics in this ménage à troise as cinema. But as the film progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that the camera’s forceful disposition has little to do with tennis and more with the jiggly, heady power concocted by the three bodies occupying the long, long tennis tour.
Challengers is familiar territory for Guadagnino, queer fissures and physicality of tennis giving the filmmaker much to explore through the bodies of its leads but more in the sensual altitude of A Bigger Splash than Call Me by Your Name. It marries the European profligacy for eroticism with the very American version of the sport stripped off its penchant for order and protocol. Wind and sun compete for attention, and heated arguments and encounters occur in narrow alleyways and serpentine tunnels beneath huge stadiums. Patrick takes off his shirt during changeover, the sun glistening on his torso in the intimate court in New Rochelle, New York and Art smolders with a stylistic flourish that mirrors his tennis, nothing but kinesio tapes lining his back. Shadows inhabit the courts and oners are filmed in claustrophobic dormitories which either end before climax or in deadlock like an unforced error ruining a great rally. The characters trade shots with psychological edge, gaining or losing hand in snaking mental games. Patrick even calls Art a snake, but not without underscoring it with a hug masquerading as headlock as they suggestively bite into churros and wipe sugar off their cheeks. It is common knowledge that tennis players prefer ice baths at tournaments, but where necessary Challengers will change it up (and to be fair, there are only two or three inaccurate tennis things), Guadagnino puts Patrick and Art in a sauna flashing each other like a tennis racquet. Ice does not sit well with this film. It prefers higher temperatures, fury and passion like when the red of a pair of taillights splash across Tashi’s revolted but desirous face during a gloriously windy night.
Challengers is a mainstream intervention that even tennis cannot imagine. The sport is watched around the globe, but it is not overwhelmingly famous in any single part of the world. The barriers to entry are huge, there are a handful of hard-core fans who watch every match of every tournament and millions of casual fans who watch the latter half of the second week of the Grand Slams. Out of nowhere, Guadagnino’s film gives an insight into the web of tennis that no docu-series (Netflix’s Break Point was cancelled earlier this year after two seasons) or promotional campaign has managed. Your favorite players probably played together since before they entered double digit age and have a lot more than just trophies riding in their tour matches as adults. Bodies intersect in myriad ways on tour beyond match play—players, umpires, officials, staff travel and stay for long periods in the same cities at the same time of the year and often in the same few hotels (Challengers portrays a beautiful scene set in Applebee’s in Mason, Ohio, during the Cincinnati Masters 2010, the date on the tournament billboard in the film features the real date). There are ample opportunities to play out past resentments, lost loves, ugly breakups, off court tantrums, crimes and misdemeanors. It is a global sport but remains a small world that interests only its principal characters and the hardcore fans. Which is why you will often see a “tennis is alive” proclamation from them when some event breaks mainstream consciousness.
Guadagnino’s film is one such “tennis is alive” moment, unique for its queer gaze that is otherwise confined to hard-core fans creating a simulacrum of a more perfect men’s tour either in their imagination or through the modern grammar of social media. Art Donaldson’s sweat drips from his nose and drops onto the lens. Rafael Nadal, dripping in sweat and elated at finally winning a hard-court Slam, reaches over to Roger Federer for a comforting hug as tears mingle with perspiration, and their heads come together for a loving embrace. Eight years later at US Open, responding to a question about his admiration for Federer, Nadal quipped, “I don’t want to look like I gonna be his boyfriend, no.” Five years after this response, Nadal and Federer shed tears together, hands grazing, after the Swiss’s final match at Laver Cup in a historic photograph. Shipping by now is an age-old internet phenomenon, an unspoken magnetic field between fans and celebrities. Federer and Nadal, among others, are not only two of the greatest tennis players ever but also the most popular men to be queer coded by fans of the sport, so much so that it trickles down from the hard-core fans to the casuals. Women have shone in tennis both on and off court with historic implications for feminist and LGBTQ movements from the generation of Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova to today’s Alison Van Uytvanck, Greet Minen, Daria Kasatkina and Nadia Podoroska. But there isn’t a publicly out gay pro men’s player despite Slams organizing Pride days and the game’s stars publicly stating that they would welcome an LGBTQ player. Brian Vahaly remains the rare former top 100 player who came out ten years after his retirement. The great Bill Tilden is the historically infamous player whose sexuality was an open secret during an entirely different era. In men’s tennis the environment for any such queer gaze is found wanting.
Challengers is a blip in the sport’s matrix where Tashi is a unifier more than a homewrecker. The much talked about threesome scene is less about the triangle and more about Tashi’s whimsical wish come true in front of her as she lies back and watches the boys make out. A moment a real tennis fan would give an arm and a leg to witness on the real men’s tour. The film’s absurdity shares some of its traits with how tennis fans engage with individual players and build narratives about their off-court lives and the union of Patrick and Art is like a dream realized, a luring “just here for the handshake” scenario, an occasion when fans look forward to the post-match acknowledgement at the net more than the result itself. The campiness of the film’s climactic dance documenting a ludicrous tennis rally between Art and Patrick is a sample of tennis fans’ samizdat revealing itself. Provocative yet silly. Ambiguous yet lucid. Tashi can do nothing but yell out an orgasmic “come on!”.