There’s something to be said about the movies on our marquees lately.
A presciently pessimistic war drama is spurring on conversation on the future of American democracy. A psychedelic, worm-heavy space opera is topping the box office. A black comedy on lesbian bodybuilders is solidly outperforming expectations.
And despite hardly being about sports or love at all, topsy-turvy tennis ménage à trois Challengers is already hotly anticipated — so much that if CBC added its similarly named 1991 film The Challengers to Gem, it could probably make up its entire deficit from confused new subscribers hoping to spot Zendaya.
That’s not to say mainstream movie-going is perfect, but it’s hard not to feel optimistic walking out of the Zendaya-led and -produced feature.
Because even in spite of occasional messy plotting — and line delivery so stilted it must be camp — Challengers does pretty much exactly what it says it will on the tin.
It’s a slow-building marvel that challenges everyone: its characters, on how far they’ll go for the film’s central theme; its writer, on the division between reality and fiction; and its viewers, on what they personally define as admirable and, conversely, as villainous.
WATCH | Challengers trailer:
That’s a lot to ask for a story that essentially begins with teenagers looking to grab a beer at a party. But Challengers has a lot more going on beneath the surface.
Unpacking starts with looking at its three pro-tennis leads. First, there’s Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), a human doormat stuck in an athletic slump, and so figuratively retiring you start to wish he’d do it literally, instead.
There’s his boarding school bedfellow and supposed best friend Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), a rugged natural superstar who seems immune to every obstacle except his unrelenting self-confidence.
Then there’s Zendaya’s Tashi Duncan. A true self-possessed force of nature, Tashi is the paragon of power and control, in a drama that looks to find out why we need those both so much.
That’s true on and off the court here. We start at the end, in an ostensibly low-stakes match between mid-30s Patrick and Art — with Tashi watching in the stands — and spend the rest of the film figuring out how we got there.
Though we meet Tashi as Art’s wife and coach, Patrick as a meandering bum sleeping in his car outside of tournaments and Art as a celebrity on a losing streak, there’s a history.
In a stylishly disjointed style, we jump around to see the come-up of all three, the plotting and feints in their playing as well as in their ways of winning their partner.
And most prophetically, there’s Tashi’s belief that tennis — and specifically winning — is not a sport; “it’s a relationship.”
It’s this slickly cynical interpretation of affection that guides the action. And as the three swirl in and out of dysfunctional and cutthroat relationships with one another — almost entirely based on ulterior motives — the line between love and competition gets impossibly blurry.
Head to head to head
Challengers is not really about tennis, and is only interested in its love triangle as far as it can be used to show the two are the same thing.
While love triangles in cinema are about as common as fuzzy headbands in tennis, Challengers moves its players into more rarefied territory. Instead of centring one character’s perspective, all three get equal footing — and audience sympathy.
There’s obvious allegiance owed to Jules and Jim, the 1962 film about two friends in love with the same woman.
But the workings under the hood closer reflect more recent throuple dramas. Like the genre-defining Y Tu Mamá También — about a pair of oversexed adolescents on an impromptu road trip alongside an older woman with poor decision-making skills — Challengers is about control.
Surface comparisons make this clear. In both, the female character subtly and gleefully prods the two young men into a physical relationship with each other.
Y Tu Mamá‘s protagonist angrily laments, “You get babies to look after, and you end up changing their diapers!” In Challengers, the same dynamic between the three is cemented by Zendaya’s already iconic line: “I’m taking such good care of my little white boys.”
But what’s most compelling about Challengers is how it works like a dark version of the 2001 film.
Y Tu Mamá‘s cast squabbles, before drifting into a quiet finale about accepting life for what it is. The message of Challengers is the opposite. The three use relationship and sport to use and belittle each another so often that the concept of love gets abstracted to its absolute basest form: who’s in control, who’s leading — and in the end, who wins?
Is it Art, for being more interested in comfort than competing? Is it the woolgathering Patrick, for refusing to give up on his dreams already? (And ignoring Tashi’s joyfully ridiculous line, “You’re 31, you have a better shot with a handgun in your mouth”?)
Or is it Tashi, who manipulates and lies for the sake of winning — something she values above all else?
Your choices for hero, villain and victim among the three may be completely different from those of the person sitting next to you.
The assertive female character as the villain
That said, intentionally or not, films do tend to position assertive female characters as villains simply for upending an expected power dynamic.
But those films usually include an explanation as to why. From Atonement‘s youthfully innocent and high-class Briony, to The Reader‘s and Kung Fu Master‘s older women corrupting their much younger loves, there’s always a comforting reason inserted to explain or excuse the shift in power.
Challengers doesn’t let you off that easily. In her first starring feature role, Zendaya shines as a deeply complex, and conflicted, Svengali.
A similar age to her partners, in the same relative stage of her career and the only non-white character of the bunch, Tashi does not have an ancillary trait to explain how she could dare manage to get one over on the boys.
As the truly athletically gifted one among them — and as both coach and manipulator of the other two — she dares us to see her as the villain. And she might just succeed.
But with so many other, and vastly more interesting, readings available, Challengers‘s biggest achievement is how its audience itself is challenged to choose one interpretation — and examine what about themselves made them choose it.