‘Challengers’: A Rally of Love, Sex and Tennis

Tennis is a sport that rewards loneliness. Players are trained to watch the ball, not the opponent. The good ones reframe it as solitude. Routines become rituals; trophies commemorate the stamina of isolation. But the great ones challenge this loneliness when they step onto court. A rally becomes a sweaty exchange of questions and answers. A game becomes a heated volley of human desire. A set becomes a window to love, hate, move, and affect another person. A match becomes a tryst that transcends conventional labels of romance, friendship, lust, loyalty, and queerness. They turn their social agency into a shared spectacle.

It’s why Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal weep together when one of them retires. It’s why they sit side by side, their hands touching one last time. Competitive rivals are transient soulmates – and their tennis is a profound attachment they will never experience again. Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers is a monument to this bond. It revolves around a fallen athlete’s all-consuming quest for this elevated psychosexual state. It’s not a tennis movie, but tennis is the language of the movie.

Challengers unfolds like a decades-long tie-break between two boys to win the heart of one girl. Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) and Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) are childhood buddies and junior stars when they meet Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), a much-touted WTA prospect. Love-all is the score when they begin. Tashi is a curious player; she perceives the sport in emotion rather than motion. She floats the idea of tennis being a relationship, not an instrument of personal expression.

This teen-aged triangle leads to a hotel-room threesome. Tashi watches the two boys kiss but stops the encounter before it leads to sex. She promises to date whoever emerges as the better player in the next day’s singles match. This turns out to be the roguish Patrick. But a rift emerges between the two when Tashi’s career is abruptly ended by an injury. She immediately senses that Patrick – who sees himself more as her peer than her follower – might not be her vessel for second-hand glory. So she dumps Patrick and eventually marries the devoted Art, coaching him to the top of the men’s game. She turns his name into his identity: He becomes her art. She sculpts him in the shape of her ambition. And Patrick fades into tennis obscurity.

Throughout the film, both men exude main-character energy. Patrick behaves like the star of an underdog sports drama: He’s performative, provocative, and likes the idea of being a journeyman who never realized his potential. He arrives at a lowly Challenger event as a nobody but battles his way through the draw and earns a title match against an ex-best friend who is supported by his ex-girlfriend. Art behaves like the star of a loaded marriage story: He’s perceptive, subservient, in thrall of a demanding wife, and uses the sport – and a successful career – to keep their companionship (or marital championship) alive. He suspects that his retirement might rob them of a future, so he plans to end on a high. Perhaps, he hopes, she will be satiated by a grudge-match victory followed by a career Grand Slam.

But it’s Tashi who is the protagonist of Challengers. She is the star of an unrequited love story. The reason neither Patrick nor her husband Art can win – or even find – her heart is because she lost it to tennis as a child. She is a raging purist stuck on the sidelines. It’s an arc of grand longing and obsession. Her post-injury life morphs into a relentless pursuit of that elusive on-court relationship. Nothing can match the high she tastes as a talented teenager. Unfortunately, her fate now rests on the rackets of those who aren’t as serious. She hijacks a sports trope traditionally associated with men, pulling their strings under the guise of mentorship. Her marriage – a front for her coaching career – becomes a slow-burning war to reclaim that feeling. She hopes to live and play through Art.

But Art never reaches that zone. He chooses percentage tennis instead; his game is too clinical. His detachment to tennis – coupled with his devotion to Tashi – makes him win more. He plays not for himself but for her and treats his results as a measure of their togetherness. The tennis itself is incidental to him. Consequently, Tashi remains unfulfilled. He is simply not enough.

After bringing Patrick (and his grin) back into their lives, Tashi simulates the loneliness required for both men to seek a connection on court. She denies her husband the love and Patrick the validation, thus manufacturing the anxiety that drives them towards each other. Art becomes her cross-court forehand and Patrick, her down-the-line backhand. Her approach is toxic but in service of a higher cause, echoing the ways of Whiplash’s Terrence Fletcher; she is somehow both selfish and selfless at once. She manipulates them out of inhibition and into intimacy, but this time for her own release.

The film closes with a tie-break between the two estranged friends with Tashi as a spectator – a “climax” that consummates the threesome all those years ago. That 13-year-old bubble of tension finally bursts. In essence, the score resets to love-all again: The bodies of Patrick and Art collide, and Tashi erupts. She rediscovers, through her human surrogates and “little White boys,” the postcoital clarity of unadulterated tennis.

At a time when sport is reduced to the mechanics of winning and losing, Challengers conspires to reveal the old-school sensuality – and tragedy – of feeling. It can be viewed as an ode to the toilers, the mid-tier strivers who survive on sensory triumphs rather than actual results. It can also be viewed as a cinematic manifestation of the GOAT (Greatest Of All Time) debate, where champions with storied rivalries are often pipped by champions with better numbers. The result of the final becomes irrelevant, because the spectators experience the truth of life in the tie-break. They see chemistry eclipsing statistics and joy upstaging algorithms. In that moment, tennis is a supernatural relationship.

But the history books record titles, not moments. They chronicle scorelines, not memories. The fact is that Tashi and her boys lose more than they win in search of that special rapport. She pushes Art and Patrick to capture the rousing humanity of a Federer-Nadal wedlock – where the outcome is not the point but every point is an outcome. The film knows that a machine like Djokovic will always own the debate. It just doesn’t care. Because the story is in the players who watch the opponent, not the ball. The romance is in the challengers, who rebel against the seclusions of tennis by balling across the net. After all, they’re just strangers, standing in front of strangers, asking to be loved.