It’s almost too good to be true. Could cinema be witnessing the birth of a stunning new mixed doubles partnership? Last year, Korean-Canadian film-maker Celine Song gave us her wonderful, Oscar-nominated debut film Past Lives, a personal love-triangle movie about a South Korean woman in the US, married to a white American writer, poignantly reconnecting with her Korean childhood sweetheart; the fictional writer, incidentally, has a novel out called Boner. Now Song’s actual white American husband Justin Kuritzkes has written this love-triangle movie, an uproarious screwball dramedy of straight sex and queer tennis: one player, incidentally, is renowned for his large penis.
Some day, film school courses will be devoted to parallel-textual analyses of these two films, and maybe the legendary third wheel will come forward with a screenplay satirising sexual stereotypes, about a woman and a man who create a sensitive drama and a macho comedy from the same situation. Challengers is terrifically absorbing and funny, with zinging extended dialogue rallies – though its cop-out ending fudges what we all know about tennis. Like life, it’s a brutal zero-sum game of winners and losers.
