Tennis Thoughts (on Challengers and Players)

Note: Contains spoilers for Players (1979) and Challengers (2024).

I watched a tennis movie the other day, Anthony Harvey’s Players (1979), and was struck by the fact that it employs the exact same framing device as Guadagnino’s Challengers would 45 years later; it begins in media res with a consequential tennis final before flashing back to the past and from then on intercalating different moments in time with the ultimate, high stakes match.

In both movies, this is employed to create tension and make the story more dynamic, which, by design, it does. Except, in Players, the central relationship (a hetero romance between a younger man and an older woman) is nowhere near as compelling as Challengers‘, nor does it find in the tennis game its metaphorical expression. Instead it’s dull, badly written (Arnold Schulman’s screenplay was allegedly botched by 6/7 script doctors) and, perhaps most notably, unenthusiastically acted (I’m being kind)…

However a very peculiar thing about the now forgotten Players is that it has legitimately great tennis scenes. They’re so good. You might think, hey, of course, how could they not? They got Guillermo Vilas to play! But the thing is, that wouldn’t be worth much unless the actor on the other side of the net could convicingly return the ball. And he does! A big reason for the sucess of Players’ tennis scenes is that, godamn, that Dean Paul Martin can swing a racket! I was very impressed, and slightly confounded watching the movie, because even though most of the scenes use editing to their benefit, he goes head to head with prime Vilas (among others) and they play fun, volley-ful points where you can actually see the footwork, the court movements, and, crucially, the ball hit the racket – I later found out he actually played tennis competitively for many years, even going so far as to actually play Wimbledon in the 70s. Well, it shows. But the naturalism and the thrill that comes from seeing actual rallies play out is very different from the effect that the tennis in Challengers caused for me.

I watched Challengers the week it came out, and I really liked it, despite a few qualms here and there (some bigger than others, admittedly). It’s a thrilling, fast-paced, fun(ny) movie that’s perfectly scored, and its freshness and liveliness feels out of place (in a good way) in this godforsaken Hollywood movie desert landscape we live in. But yesterday I rewatched it with Players still fresh in my mind, and while I still had fun, as a tennis fan and incorrigible nitpicker when it comes to things I love, I was even more let down by the tennis scenes.

It’s undeniable that the trio’s dynamic in Challengers is what makes the movie. The relationships are enticing and the motivations mischiveous; the dialogue is delicious, so razor-sharp and tongue in cheek, especially between Art (Faist) and Patrick (O’Connor). The final that conducts the plot is doubly delightful because it is narratively given such weight and importance, but it is also literally a Challenger final in a suburb of New York City being played in a local country club. The movie does a lot with this dissonance (I suspect especially for a tennis-savvy viewer).

But like I was saying, on this second time, I did feel like the tennis scenes were bad more often than not. Most of the time the cgi tennis ball is so blatant the scenes can’t look anything other than lame. Players, as movies of yore in general tend to, attests to the significance of a prop’s physicality, the literal weight of it. There is no digital substitute for the mere weight and feel of a proper OBEJCT. That couldn’t be truer than for a ball sport. The tennis ball comes fast and it comes hard and, as it hits your racket, your body reacts accordingly, so you can usually tell, visually, when someone is hitting one and when someone isn’t. I am not naive, I know this is for logistical reasons, and I understand that, I just don’t appreciate it and I think it makes for a worse movie lol. Like, I get doing that for the more audaciously shot and complex compositions (some of which I thought were really fun and interesting, others not so much), but the simpler ones feel really bogged down by this as well. A lot of the time, mainly during Art-Patrick rallies, they try to directly circumvent this issue by cutting to another shot before the actor actually ‘hits’ the ball which made for some disorienting and, at the end of the day, absolutely counterintuitive editing for tennis back and forths.

This time around I even noticed a scene where you can very clearly see Josh O’Connor’s face pasted onto the double and it’s quite jarring. God knows I’ve already aired my grievances with Zendaya, but she’s undoubtebly the worst part in this regard as well, her tennis playing is horrendous even without considering the fact that she isn’t hitting a real ball most of the time. Her backswing is specially bad and her footwork is laughable, it’s really quite baffling to me why they didn’t do shit to help her with this… The US Open Junior final scene is the stuff of nightmares, girl, what are you even doing. No way that backhand got you to the final….

There is magic in the tennis scenes in Players, because there is real contact happening there, real player movements, real reactions to the ball and to the opponent – in short: real tennis. A good analogy would be if you could tell two actors were not reacting to each other in a scene, just saying their lines separately in different sets and the editor was cutting them together. It’s a tennis movie, after all, so I don’t think I’m being unreasonable.

There was, to me, a pretty noticeable emptiness left by the absence of real tennis. I could wax philosophical about this, I could employ the oldest, stalest comparison in the game, which is that of chess, to talk about how tennis is literally about anticipating your oponent’s move, and how that implies observing them intently. About how a lot of tennis is not about strenght alone but about placement. But you wouldn’t be able to tell this from watching Challengers. You’d think it’s a ballbasher world and we’re just living in it. There really isn’t one single scene where you can actually have a sense of the movements, the trajectory of the ball, the anticipation, the response. Actually most of the time you can actually see that despire the ball being computer generated, they are not returning the same ball that was played the shot before, for instance.

I could also talk about how knowing the way they like to play, they way they don’t like to play, where they serve, where they will serve depending on how they toss the ball, what their weaknesses are, what their strenghts are actually, in short, about how knowing your opponent makes them so much more vulnerable and susceptible to be defeated by you. This is all great stuff for a movie that presents tennis as extension of the relationship” (and vice-versa). So, you see, it’s not ALL just pretentious nitpicking from a tennis fan! It’s great stuff they could have used with a different approach.

So why do I still think Challengers works? I think it still works because it uses the tennis match as integral part of the narrative, and by that I mean the story flows onto the court fluently and , so that basically everything that happens in the Phil’s Tire Town Challenger final, the broken racket, the underarm serve, someone taking a longer time to serve, someone taking off a shirt during changeover, eating a banana, walking past their oponent during change of sides, etc., almost every single beat is also a narrative beat. So the tennis match is not just significant to the plot in the grander scheme of things – i.e. the result of the match – it literally is the plot. I find this, formally, a very impressive and refreshing achievement.

In this way, Challengers and Players are kind of like perfect opposites of each other, because Players most definitely does not do that, it does not integrate the points within the tennis matches narratively. This is also why the great tennis scenes in Players do not save the movie; they feel, when not merely incidental, really just perfunctory cogs in a drab, meaningless machine. Challengers’ screenplay is anything but drab, anything but meaningless. And it is given very self-assured direction that makes it come to life.

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Don’t think I don’t know most people don’t give a single shit about this, lol. My friend even said that to me word for word, he told me I’m literally the only one thinking about this and being bothered. Well, I’m not bothered per se, I am just a bonafide nitpicker when it comes to things I love.

Anyways, let’s get Players a Blu-ray release ASAP, it only having a VHS one and no DVD whatsoever is atrocious, come on, bad movies deserve respect, too. And Guillermo Vilas in his short shorts on Wimbledon Centre Court is historically significant, deserving of conservation.

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