Challengers (2024)
On concupiscence, disappointment, and Luca Guadagnino's latest
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Who do you think they are to each other?
This is the opening line of a different film, but it is difficult not to think of it while watching Challengers, Luca Guadagnino’s latest cinematic document of yearning. Told in non-linear fashion through the framing device of a critical 2019 game between childhood best friends Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick (Josh O’Connor), the film unpacks their complex relationships with both each other and their shared love interest Tashi (Zendaya) over the course of 13 years, constantly keeping the viewer uncertain, through Guadagnino’s trademark unspoken codes and double-speak, about what the answer to that question really is.
Perhaps a way to begin answering that question is to ask a few others: What do they need from each other? and Who do they need each other to be?
Before our feature presentation: A brief bout of pop catechism.
In St. Augustine’s Confessions, he writes about concupiscence as a “hurtful desire” borne of Adam’s original sin and that all humans since inherit from him. He characterizes it as a “privation” or lack of good, likening it to a “wound”. To live in sin then, according to Augustine and much of the prevailing catechism of the modern Catholic Church, is to suffer from a lack, and to fall short of the perfect human nature that had been initially envisioned in Eden.
Much of the Bible is stories about people falling short, and if there is any prevailing theme in the doctrine, it is that man inevitably succumbs to this lack, their innate inclination towards sin. In the Old Testament, Moses disobeys God, strikes the rock twice, and is denied entry into Canaan; David conspires to hide his infidelity with Bathsheba and is visited by tragedy upon two of his sons. In the New Testament, Peter, ostensibly chief among the apostles, denies Christ thrice before the cock crows. Even the greatest of men in the Good Book are, in the end, just that: Men.
This is to say that the central tension of the Catholic lens is less about man or God than it is about the chasm-like distance between them that was created by original sin: One that could only be bridged through grace. This is, of course, the kernel of the proposition: That we are only saved through the generous grace of God, by definition unearned and freely given. It is grace that calls us away from sin and towards God, that inspires us to partake in our initial divine nature—the sublime, so to speak—despite concupiscence, the weakness of the flesh.
Beyond its well-publicized steaminess, Challengers is preoccupied more broadly with this very weakness of the flesh, of which the lust and love that’s made up the bulk of the film’s marketing campaign is part and parcel. More than anything, our three protagonists are each defined by their respective lack, and as their threads entangle and diverge over a decade and a half, they are each forced to reckon with the myriad ways their lives have fallen short of them, and the myriad ways they have fallen short of each other.
The most explicit of these reckonings is Tashi’s, as she injures her knee early on in the film, a disaster that robs her of what was poised to be a generational (and lucrative) professional run. In fact, one of the first things we see is a close-up on the surgical scar on her knee—quite literally a closed-up wound—in the present day. In another pivotal scene after her injury, she removes her knee brace in frustration, realizing she would never regain her old form; it is shot almost like a funeral, choral music and all. There is a kind of death there, after all, and a kind of grief too: For a version of yourself that was promised but never realized, whether justly or not.
Art and Patrick’s respective bugaboos are much more straightforward, in that they are each other’s. Coming up at the same tennis boarding school as doubles partners and (very) close friends, the two take diverging paths through their twenties due to their own frailties. Despite being the more talented of the two, Patrick is kneecapped by his own impractical arrogance; meanwhile, the less gifted but more grounded Art cannot take ownership of his life due to his unquestioning devotion to Tashi. One could make the case that they could’ve both done better with the other person’s lot in life—and before the day of Tashi’s fateful injury, their trajectories were essentially flipped—but that wasn’t the road their shortcomings led them down.
Here are three protagonists, then, who come of age believing they could do anything and be anyone, but whose lives end up being defined by what they are unable to do and who they cannot be. Yes, the sex is the sizzle, but this is the steak: No one is ever who they thought they would be, at least not entirely. Even when the spirit is willing, the flesh, alas, is weak.
You’ve got to learn to live with what you can’t rise above.
So croons Bruce Springsteen in “Tunnel of Love”, one of the more underrated singles from his remarkable 80s pop run and a song that features, interestingly enough, in this film. It takes a sharp-eared viewer with more than a passing familiarity with the Boss’s oeuvre to catch it, so buried is it in the sound mixing, but it’s there, piping through the speakers of the small-town Applebee’s where Art and Tashi reconnect and rekindle a romance, now older and a bit wiser than they were when they last spoke.
In a piece for Indiewire, Kate Erbland writes about Challengers through the lens of this needle drop, arguing for it as a skeleton key that unlocks the film’s complex (albeit not always coherent) treatise on the complexities love takes on when two people decide to engage in the difficult dance of loving. It’s an insightful read, but it is rooted in the premise that Art and Tashi share a more mature dynamic than either of them do with the flightier Patrick, which feels true only in the surface.
The truth is, however, that Art and Tashi—unlike their respective relationships with Patrick, which are combustible and unsustainable but between peers—are a codependent couple in 2019, each living vicariously through the other to fill that lack in their lives. “I’m playing for the both of us,” an exhausted Art even admits to Tashi late in the film, his passion for the sport having long since been eroded by time. She gives his life more purpose than he could ever find on his own, and he allows her to live something close to the sort of life she might’ve led had her knee held up. When confronted with that chasm-like distance between who they are and who they ought to be, the two choose to try and bridge that gap with each other, a quietly doomed premise from the jump.
In contrast, 2019 Patrick is in much direr material straits, but understands and has made peace with his own lack in a way that the other two haven’t quite with theirs. Despite being a loser in life by any measure, having to bum half a bagel for food and shack up with bad Tinder first dates for a place to sleep, he has no illusions about his situation; he is even honest about his own delusions. While all three of them are, to some degree, running away from a kind of adulthood—tennis as both Eden and Neverland—Patrick is blatantly doing so, while the other two seem to be cosplaying at a kind of maturity in order to avoid the actual work of being mature.
That is where each of the three find their paths once again diverging at New Rochelle. All this culminates in the final rally, which I won’t spoil here. Suffice it to say, however, that it climaxes—word choice very intentional—into something that blurs the line between the carnal and the divine, as if that line needed any more blurring in the first place. It begins with a confession and ends with a reconciliation, and if you know your sacraments, you know that those are both forms of penance. In that moment, they bridge the gap between themselves and the sublime, that perfect tennis that inspires one to jump out of their seat and scream.
After all, what is grace but learning to live with what you can’t rise above?