Yeah x10: Too Many Words About CHALLENGERS
Or, help! A tennis movie ate my brain.
I think, more than any film in recent history, Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers was my most anticipated film—certainly in the last five years or so. While his work prior to Call Me By Your Name remains a mystery to me (I’m working on it), between the emotional devastations of his first film with Timothee Chalamet and his second, Bones and All, Luca Guadagnino’s films remain at the forefront of my mind. Bones and All, in particular, made him a truly household name in the queer ass home of my mind. Until Challengers, I thought of no film more, but then the tennis movie happened to me.
There is truly a BC (Before Challengers) and an AC (After Challengers) in the division of my mind. Like, I actually don’t think it’s hyperbolic at all to say that this film changed my brain chemistry. A few films over the years have and, considering I saw it five times in theaters, I think Challengers has a right to sit in the weird, but very high, echelon of my mind.
Told non-linearly (perhaps my favorite story device when done as well as this), it’s a film about three people who are broken in very specific, but complimentary ways. When Greta Gerwig wrote the screenplay for her adaptation of Little Women, she intercut the first half of the book into the second half as a flashback mechanic. She was very specific that from each of the starting points of the story, the plot should only move forward. Which is, in my humble opinion, the best way to do the non-linear storyline when you’re not messing about with time travel (that’s a completely different conversation, after all). It’s also the way that Justin Kuritzkes’s script, at least the shooting script that made it to screen, is written. Except there are three timelines that all move forward. Which absolutely rules! (Other than the exception of the ending shots at the start of the film, something else that makes my brain break in beautiful and incomprehensible ways.)
At our base we have the timeline that starts when Art, Tashi, and Patrick are all 18 at the Junior US Open in 2006. That timeline, which covers the most ground, continues forward with their lives up until 2011: the Atlanta Open. It includes the start and ending of Patrick and Tashi, the ending of Art and Patrick, and the start of Tashi and Art. Not to mention the later couple’s engagement and the one-night-only (until New Rochelle) rekindling of Tashi and Patrick.
Then we have the road to the New Rochelle Challenger in 2019. This one is basically how Art, Tashi, and Patrick all ended up at the challenger sponsored by Phil’s Tire Town. Art, having recovered from an injury, is off his game. Tashi is frustrated and they’re in the greatest fail!marriage of all time—on the absolute verge of an implosion. And Patrick? Well, despite being a rich boy, he’s slumming it and still trying to make it as a professional tennis player. It’s not going well.
And, finally, we have the hyper specific timeline of the final match between Art and Patrick at the New Rochelle Challenger, with Tashi watching from the sidelines. This is the opening and ending of the film and it’s how Kuritzkes breaks up the three acts—it also is a great piece of telegraphic storytelling because the flashbacks and each of the matches in the final all mirror each other as they move forward. The wins and the losses of each directly correspond to those two earlier timelines.
For instance, I always think about Tashi’s comment during her and Patrick’s conversation at the elevator in Tashi and Art’s hotel during the second timeline. “You typically fall apart in the second round.” Which we see happen in the second match of the final, not too much later. But it also means the second act, which is where Patrick and Tashi’s egos clash and he loses the two great loves of his life.
And, of course, there’s The Serve™. Introduced, in its meaningful form, in an interstitial between acts as part of the youngest timeline, The Serve™ is at once the personification of Patrick’s refusal to grow up (as seen in the script), but also as the coded language of two teenage boys who clearly want to be involved. Art might be the one who says the fated “I just don’t wanna feel left out,” but it’s clear from the start that Patrick’s horrendously in love with his best friend.
Something that I find interesting about The Serve™, though, is that Art does it, obviously, but so does Tashi. And by “it,” I mean putting the ball in the neck of the racket before serving. Patrick’s the only one who has a wack-ass serve and the other two do not let him forget it throughout their lives—Art when they’re teenagers, and then Tashi when they’re in their 30s. Patrick repeating The Serve™ in the final moments of the match is him being an asshole, sure, but it’s also him being honest. It’s him bringing them back together. He doesn’t want to be left out anymore. He got himself back in, at least temporarily, with one of them and in the middle of a match he does the only thing he knows will let Art back in. If it makes him a little hot and horny to reveal that very specific information in this very specific way… well, he never said he wasn’t a piece of shit.
Honestly, it’s this kind of beautiful thing that serves (pun intended) the larger idea that Guadagnino and Kuritzkes bring into the love triangle. “In any love triangle, all the corners should touch.” That was what Luca told Justin when he was considering taking on the film. Which wasn’t the case before Guadagnino came on, but it seemed like the electricity that Kuritzkes needed to make the film great. Which is not to say that the script isn’t plenty queer, but it’s decidedly not on purpose. At any rate, the other thing that came out of the love triangle conversation is the notion that whenever you write a true love triangle (as my high school best friend used to say “most ‘love triangles’ are actually love chevrons”) then when there are scenes with just two of the people, the third person should still be there. And it’s something I think this film knocks out of the park. The third person is always haunting the narrative.
Now, I’m nothing if not a horny bisexual lady and this film packs a punch right into to all the things I’m interested in. It’s got bisexuals (a surprising, but very welcome, staple in Guadagnino’s recent filmography, all things considered). It’s got not one, not two, but three messy relationships that should just be one relationship… except these idiots cannot get their shit together. (I adore polyamory when everyone is interested in each other, even if it’s beyond messy.) And it has really interesting and propelling camera work and music.
I know a lot of people find the music overbearing, but I’m an absolute slut for the scores of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. The Social Network remains one of my favorite films, but also absolutely one of my favorite scores of all time. I think the duo's work with both David Fincher and Luca Guadagnino are certainly some of their most different and compelling pieces of work. I’m obsessed with the way they use this high energy, EDM-type music to punctuate the characters and their emotional states. The starting and stopping worked for me in ways that, if I’d had it described to me and not experienced it, I don’t think I would have enjoyed otherwise. But I’m here on this journey with these three people and so is the music.
But speaking of David Fincher… Luca Guadagnino and his cinematographer (for this and Call Me By Your Name), Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, are absolutely making a play for Fincher’s digital camera and they’re not losing. From the first real digital shot of the film that goes over and through the empire and right to Tashi, to the shots where the camera is the ball, and even to the clear tennis court they shot under to get some shots that will be burned into my brain forever—Challengers is a gorgeous film. I’m obsessed with the way Mukdeeprom and Guadagnino shoot things, almost never shooting closeups straight on. Instead, they’re often lower or higher and they give such an interesting look and frenetic feel to the film, without doing all the very cool whip panning they also do.
Also, I know at some point people decided the camera-as-the-ball shot wasn’t actually good and cool, but that it was amateurish. People went so far as to say that it was very “film school,” which is certainly something for people who aren’t filmmakers or professional film critics to say. But let me tell you. As somebody who works in post production professionally (like, it’s the only thing I currently get paid to do), that sequence is incredible. Additionally, if anyone at my film school had managed to pull off a sequence half, or even a quarter, as absolutely based as the camera-as-the-ball sequence from Challengers, then I would have absolutely shot myself in the head. Like, be so fucking for real right now.
But ultimately, the things that work for me the most about Challengers are the relationships. All three of the two-person ones, but also the shadow lurking in the background that is the three-person one. Each two-person relationship is delicious in its own way. Art and Patrick have the “best friends since we were twelve” thing going on. Not to mention the jerk-off story—which is so utterly charming, I might die.
Between the script and the film, you have things like the boys’ lines at the beach, about their relationship, when Tashi says she’s not a homewrecker are flipped in the film. It absolutely drove me up a wall when I finally got my eyes on the available version of the script. Both versions tell you so much about both men and how they view their relationship with each other and their potential relationships with Tashi. Having the film have Patrick say they’re in an open relationship is crucial. In part because he’s already pretty secure in how he feels about Art, but also because he’s ultimately much more secure in his sexuality. Maybe he hasn’t done a lot with it yet, but the Tinder swiping later in the film is pretty meaningful in this regard. Obviously, he’s doing it for a place to sleep, but never underestimate a bisexual slut because while Art’s been repressing his bisexuality for thirteen years, Patrick has been throwing himself into lots and lots of people since he lost the only two people who he actually gives a shit about.
It’s also the thing that makes the sauna scene hurt so much. That and the fact that the film gives us no indication that Art and Patrick ever spoke again after Patrick left when they were teenagers. The fracturing of their relationship is so much greater than that of Patrick and Tashi, after all. In part because the relationship he had with Tashi is much different than the one he had with Art. Personally, it feels like the kind of divide of “I want to stay in your orbit” vs “I always thought you’d stay in mine.” Because Art was his best friend, first and foremost, it means he’s less worried about that relationship staying intact—like he maybe didn’t feel like he had to work for Art. And so, the sauna, when they finally have their first conversation post-Stanford, is this brutal and perfect thing of them hurting themselves and each other. They don’t know how to be with each other anymore, despite still being in sync. Despite Art saying Patrick doesn’t matter, it’s clear he does. Even if Patrick takes it as face value. He has no defenses against Art being mean.
Then there are the small things, which make a beautiful and complicated whole picture. Tashi and Patrick both take Art’s gum in their hands before he plays. Patrick always steals Art’s food (the sandwiches at the Junior Open and the churro scene at Stanford). Patrick steals both Art and Tashi’s shirts throughout the first timeline (he’s literally wearing Art’s shirt from that day when they nearly have the threesome). “Can you do me a favor and not demolish me tomorrow?” How Art’s name overtakes Patrick’s on the center of the New Rochelle board, foreshadowing the jump over the net. “Who wouldn’t be in love with you?” The way they evoke Tashi’s knee injury to ratchet up the tension in the final sequence. Not to mention Patrick and Tashi’s fight being, in part, his refusal to take her “coaching,” only to have him ask her to coach him, over a decade later.
These are three people who cannot exist, and certainly cannot be happy in any way that makes sense, without each other. They’ve spent their entire lives thinking they can’t have all the things they want, but they can. They can and they will. Because if you think for a single second that this doesn’t end with the three of them in that fancy-ass hotel room, then I don’t know what to say to you. Maybe Art doesn’t get his career slam, but he still retires. Maybe Tashi somehow makes Patrick into someone. Regardless of the future, though, they’re doing it together.
(I trust you to read tags and things, if you venture forward into these.)
love-all — lecornergirl (Art-Centric, throughout time)
you and your phantom, driving me wild — vokdas (soulmate AU)
is a dream a lie if it don't come true or is it something worse — comosum (Post-canon, mixed media)
tennis court — loverism (Post-canon, mixed media)
you can watch from your window — rib14 (Post-canon, mixed media)
anon pls — dharmainitiative (Post-canon, mixed media)
