"Is Wanting to Be a Person in Love the Same as Being a Person in Love?"

Talking about Challengers with Consumption Report's Akosua T. Adasi

Hi! In April I wrote about slowing down over the summer before taking time off from weekly dispatches for the first time in over a year. So what have I been up to over the last three weeks? I cleared out hundreds of open browser tabs, finished half a book, and watched Challengers twice.¹ Despite a previous disinterest in most ‘sports movies,’ I was instantly enthralled by the film in all its feverish, exuberant glory. Thankfully, RAFTM²

Akosua T. Adasi

was obsessed with it too, and was willing to go tête-à-tête with me in a Challengers chat of our own. We discussed love triangles as a medium for investigating power and desire, the role that grief plays in motivating the characters, and why we love Italian directors. Thanks again Akosua for joining me, and hope you all enjoy!

Spoilers for Challengers to follow… 🎾

Written and directed by Justin Kuritzkes and Luca Guadagnino respectively, the film follows three young tennis stars over the course of a ten-year love triangle. From left, Art (Mike Faist), Tashi (Zendaya), and Patrick (Josh O’Connor).

Solitary Daughter

: Hi Akosua! I’m so excited to be chatting with you about Challengers, which was probably the most fun I’ve had at the movies in recent memory. First of all, how many times have you seen it now, and how did those various viewings impact your experience of the film? 

Akosua T. Adasi

: Thanks for asking me! I totally agree with you about this being the most fun I’ve had at a movie for some time. When Barbie came out, everyone was like “movies are so back!” I liked Barbie well enough but that sentiment didn’t ring true to me until I saw Challengers, honestly. 

I’ve seen Challengers four times now. I sort of had planned to do three because Zendaya had said in an interview you should watch it three times, but I wasn’t sure if I would want to. I was really nervous that it wouldn’t live up to my expectations because I was so excited about it from the moment I saw the trailer. Obviously, it exceeded my expectations. I ended up seeing it a fourth time because I 1) wanted to see it once on my own and 2) I was inspired to write about the sauna scene and wanted to revisit it first.

I’ve talked a bit about how seeing it multiple times made me appreciate the smaller details, like background conversations and noise. Guadagnino does such great things with background conversation—just one of the ways he reminds us that all of this is happening in the world, not just some sealed off enclosure. This last time watching it, I really noticed Art’s hungry face, especially when he watches Tashi. There’s the one scene when he goes to watch her practice (before he takes her to lunch and ruins her life) and the way his eyes linger on her, the way he waves—the scene could easily fit in a stalker movie. The other scene is when he doesn’t text Patrick back to convince him to come to Tashi’s game. You see him make the choice to put away his phone and then as the camera stays on him, you can see his brain working away. I was never under the impression that Art Donaldson wasn’t a mastermind (cue Taylor Swift) but I never really saw how deep it ran!

Solitary Daughter

: I loved your analysis of the sauna scene, which you describe as “an incredibly revealing scene, one that belies the suggestion that Art is the plaything of Tashi and Patrick, the weaker link”—though as you note later on, Art’s machinations are no less calculated, despite their more subtle reveal. I’m also glad that your review mentioned that Challengers was written by Justin Kuritzkes, husband of Past Lives director Celine Song. For reader context, there’s been a lot of memes about their marriage online because both films ostensibly deal with love triangles, but…do they? In your view, would you consider either film a love triangle first and foremost? Can the word “love” even fully capture the dynamic between the three main characters, if power is so heavily laced through their desire for each other? 

Akosua T. Adasi

: I didn’t see any of the memes but I definitely had the thought about Justin and Celine’s interest in threesomes when I first made the connection! (Honestly that one picture of them where she’s holding his arm and they’re both staring out at the camera is pure, “Hey we saw you standing over here,” so even without the movies, the jokes already wrote themselves.) 

Written and directed by Celine Song, Past Lives follows childhood sweethearts Nora and Hae Sung over the course of two decades while they drift in and out of each other’s lives. From left, Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), Nora (Greta Lee), and Nora’s husband Arthur (John Magaro).

I don’t think it’s wrong to think of either Past Lives or Challengers as movies about love triangles. Is that the primary thing they’re interested in? Not really. But I also think both writers seem compelled by the problems that an entangled threesome raises, especially when it comes to being an artist. Both movies investigate triangular desire as the beating heart of artistic passion—not just I want you, but I want to be you.

I’ve never been in romantic love so I’m willing to accept a heady combo of desire and power struggle as a form of love! For you, though, is the word “love” reductive when it comes to describing the relationships in Challengers? Is wanting to be a person in love the same as being a person in love? I’m just thinking of Tashi who, although her first love may be tennis or maybe because it’s tennis, primarily shows her love for both Patrick and Art by trying to make them good at tennis. She’s not just giving Patrick tips on his game because she doesn’t want an embarrassing boyfriend or she’s cruel! 

“Both movies investigate triangular desire as the beating heart of artistic passion—not just I want you, but I want to be you.”

Akosua T. Adasi

Solitary Daughter

: That’s such a fantastic point, and something I found very relatable about Tashi’s character, which is that she is uncompromising with her own ambition, and so she expects it out of others as well. But it’s all in service of her art, which is tennis. She wants the art of tennis to improve, and she wants to be the vessel through which it happens. In a way, her passion is selfless, because for her to truly enjoy a match would require an equal opponent. But without each other, Art and Patrick have lost the oppositional spark that made them so interesting to her in the first place.

In my reading of the film, the three of them feed off each other’s insufficiencies, but also their strengths. They need each other to be at the top of their game, or at the bottom of it. It’s not necessarily that the word “love” might be reductive to describe their relationships, but I wonder if it’s sufficient. You’re right, though, in that their competitiveness is less indicative of their feelings for each other and more so their feelings for themselves. As you pointed out, both Past Lives and Challengers use triads as the medium through which they analyze each character’s individual growth and ambition–in fact, the way they push and pull each other is the basis of their love. 

The triad is also complicated, in my view, by grief. I was expecting to enjoy the visuals, the music, the frenetic cinematography. Tashi’s grief, however, was an unexpectedly poignant element for me. She’s a rising tennis star who suffers a career-ending injury after a fight with Patrick, and in one fell swoop she loses both her partner and the sport on which she’s hinged her entire sense of purpose. So of course the two losses become fused into one, and she spends the next decade resenting him as the sole driver of her misery, choosing to funnel all of her leftover rage and sorrow into shaping Art’s career instead. And what I appreciated about the film was that it didn’t indict Tashi for her anger at Patrick, irrational as it may be (sorry, the Patrick defender in me is logging on). In their adulterous dalliances with each other over the next decade, Patrick allows himself to be her punching bag because he understands that for her to accept any accountability for the loss would be unbearable. So I’m curious: what was your reading of how grief and loss impacted each relationship? 

Akosua T. Adasi

: I am a Patrick girlie, and I don’t think Patrick is that nice! If he’s her punching bag, it’s because he likes it and it turns him on. He says in the car, “The thing you like about me is that I’m a piece of shit” or something like that, and she doesn’t correct him. 

Although the scene where Tashi breaks down sitting under that tree breaks my heart, I haven’t spent that much time thinking about her actions as driven by grief. I took her at her word, maybe too easily, when she told Art, “What was I supposed to do? Kill myself?” If I think about it, I guess the way grief has impacted, not necessarily the relationships, but all three of them individually, is that none of them have ever really grown up. It’s not necessarily that they’re stuck in time but they don’t actually deal with their emotions any differently than they did when they were eighteen. Maybe because they don’t deal with their grief in any tangible way—it’s “Compress/Repress” for a reason!—it’s hard for me to say what place grief has in their story and in their relationships. 

“The way grief has impacted, not necessarily the relationships, but all three of them individually, is that none of them have ever really grown up.”

Akosua T. Adasi

Written and directed by Alice Rohrwacher, La chimera follows Arthur (Josh O’Connor) as a young British archeologist with a mythological gift for tomb raiding.

I know we wanted to talk about La chimera as well, which also stars my man, Josh O’Connor (talk about versatile). Grief is really interesting in that movie because for Arthur (O’Connor) and Flora (Isabella Rossellini) grief is denial, grief is waiting. Arthur seems to have come to better terms with Benaimina’s death than Flora—he’s at least accepted that it has happened. But then the end of the movie suggests that he has been searching for her the entire time and that search has led him, physically and psychically, in and out of these tombs. La chimera is a really interesting depiction of raw grief—Arthur’s sadness visibly hangs on him—that is also sublimated. 

Solitary Daughter

: This conversation was unexpectedly well-timed for me because Challengers was just released on streaming services yesterday. Watching it for the second time, I was struck again by how little “interior” life we see from each of the characters–we never learn much about their childhoods, parents, or even other relationships. That absence works well for the film however, because as you note, “none of them have ever really grown up.” You know those child prodigy types who spend their entire young adulthood conquering a sport, an instrument, an art form, etc. but when it’s time to actually hang out with people their own age they can’t keep up? That’s absolutely Tashi and the boys, and so it makes sense that they find comfort in each other, but also why they drive each other insane. 

Our mutual friend

Tia

recently wrote about bodily comportment in film, especially how “it shows us the ways in which we relate to and live with one another through the fog of interpersonal opacity, dependent on each others’ reactions, reception, and mis/understanding.” Early on, the boys ask Tashi what compels her about tennis, if it’s not just to express herself or prove something. She explains that sometimes, if you’re lucky, you hit a rhythm with your opponent that feels like being in love. Maybe I’m predisposed to find a thread of grief and mourning in every storyline, but I imagine the loss that happens when she can no longer access that feeling to be one of enormous heartbreak and grief, which is why the ending shot of her face in total ecstasy had me so choked up both times. Movement is what draws them in to each other, and when she loses it, she must watch as they squander the abilities she would kill to regain (her disgust to find out Patrick still smokes, how Art takes his own recovery for granted…)

In your review of La chimera, you wrote that it’s “about trying to reverse the fate of what was thought to be irretrievably lost at the risk of going too far and getting lost yourself.” How fortuitous then that our man Josh happens to star in both films, because I think this line could describe Challengers as well. You write that his character in La chimera, Arthur, is “following some kind of compass or string that only he can see. But instead of helping him return to the world, it plunges him eternally into nothingness. Though maybe for him that nothingness is everything.” For Tashi, her greatest fear would be to end up the cheerleader in her mediocre husband’s life story, so that sense of constant searching for the ephemeral feels pertinent across both films. Neither Tashi nor Arthur are willing to compromise, which is why for either to feel satisfied, they must arrive at a kind of otherworldly nirvana (hence why both films end with their faces in varying degrees of ecstasy, which I won’t spoil). Before we wrap up, I’d love to hear any of your last thoughts regarding the two films and other linkages you might have noticed. 

Akosua T. Adasi

: My last thought: I’m so grateful for Italian directors with a strong sense of imagination and a powerful belief in sexiness. AhMEN! 

1. Other recent favourites include Summertime, La chimera, Hundreds of Beavers (thanks to

Cydney Hayes

for the recommendation!), and PlayTime, which was perfection.

2. Reader And Friend To Me, a term I learned from

Consumption Report

.