By Meg Walters
‘It turns out all I’m good at is hitting a ball with a racket,’ says Zendaya’s Tashi about halfway through Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers. Tashi is an ex-tennis prodigy whose blossoming career screeches to a halt following a devastating knee injury. After years of resolutely training for athletic glory, her only skill, and (perhaps more importantly) her only passion, is tennis: the brutal, beautiful synergy that takes place between the players, the rackets and the ball. And so, she has turned to coaching as a disappointing alternative to playing, transplanting this passion onto other players – namely her husband Art (Mike Faist).
Earlier in the film, Tashi describes what she loves about tennis: ‘It’s a relationship,’ she says. What she means is, when two players really start playing together, it becomes sublime. The climactic scene of Challengers is not, as the trailer and social-media hype might have you believe, to do with sex. Instead, it happens when Art and his old doubles partner – and Tashi’s old ex – Patrick (Josh O’Connor) stop playing games and start playing real, sublime tennis. Tashi is finally getting a taste of what she has been missing. The film ends with Tashi giving a guttural, primal cry: ‘Come on!’
