All you need is 15-LOVE to start a match
tennis obsession.'
'That's 15, love,' he says with a goofy grin.
Tennis and love are the subjects of Luca Guadagnino's brilliant Challengers, which I watched on the big screen earlier this year — and that's the only way to watch it, to respect the kinetic, uninhibited energy of a movie that refuses to play it safe. You can call this a mashup of lush romantic drama, erotic thriller, and sports movie about overvaulting ambition. Any way you choose to see it, it makes something like King Richard — about the early struggles of Venus and Serena Williams and their dad — look even more insipid than it already was.
But what is a 'tennis film' exactly? Aren't great real-world matches epic films too? I think so, having spent the last two decades obsessively watching men's tennis, with my Rafael Nadal super-fandom as the fuel. A 'favourite films of the year' list I made for 2022 included Nadal's come-from-behind victory in the Australian Open final. It was the closest any recent 'content' has brought me to jumping around excitedly, making tribal noises. (No feature film, whether made by Wim Wenders or Anees Bazmee, has had that effect.)
Watching Challengers — a story about the changing fortunes and personal relationships of three young tennis pros over a decade and a half — was a comparably visceral experience, thanks to the pace and boldness of the storytelling, the lead performances and the pulsating music score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
(An amusing but understandable phenomenon on recent Twitter tennis
