L’oeuf-All: Music and Image in “Challengers”
Content Warning: plot spoilers, profanity, crude sexual references
There are several theories for why we say “love” instead of “zero” in tennis scoring lingo. My favorite, and the least likely to be true, is that the oval arabic numeral for “zero” is shaped like an egg, and the French word for “the egg” is l’oeuf. When a new game starts in tennis, the score is “love-all,” 0–0 — neither player has the advantage. Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, with the help of its clever score and soundtrack, seems to argue that love is competition and winning is nothing. L’oeuf, love. Same thing.
After a crafty bit of prologue and exposition, the film hits its stride on the New York City shoreline. It is the night before Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick (Josh O’Connor) are to face-off in the 2006 U.S. Open Junior Men’s Singles Championship match — a match they’ve already agreed to throw so that Art, who assumes he would lose based purely on skill, can make his ailing grandmother proud. But this isn’t the match the film is interested in, because tennis isn’t a game, “it’s a relationship.” On the eve of the match, Art and Patrick sit smoking in opposing Adirondack chairs while Zendaya’s Tashi is perched between them atop a rock, backdropped by the sea and the moon — a siren calling both of them to bring their best to win the prize. Whether she calls them toward danger is ambiguous, but she certainly calls them to strive, and they take the bait. The score, composed by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, atmospherically paints the serene setting with a meandering b-minor piano melody washed in a bed of synth and strings and wind, deceptively oscillating between the b-minor tonic and the G-major sixth. This creates a sense of tonal unmooring — there’s no real musical resolution; we are volleying back and forth between the two chords, and neither has the advantage. The name of this track on the Challengers original soundtrack album? “L’ouef.” Game on.
Art and Patrick are best friends and doubles partners who have already won the U.S. Open Junior Men’s Doubles championship — consummated in an absurd freeze-frame of the pair simultaneously kissing their trophy — Art screen left and Patrick screen right. Despite their combined success on the court, the boys don’t seem to be taking tennis very seriously. They smoke, drink sugary soda and cheap beer, and eat Taco Bell the night before what should probably be the most important tennis match of their lives. When Tashi accepts an invitation to their hotel room later that night, the lines between tennis, relationships, and sex begin to blur. We learn that Art and Patrick have an unusual level of intimacy, with Patrick boasting of the time years ago when he “taught” Art how to masturbate — consummating their sexual relationship on opposite sides of their boarding school dorm room while they jerked off to completion on separate beds.
Tashi continues to play the role of the siren and the coach, beckoning both Art and Patrick toward better, fuller versions of themselves. When the trio finishes off the last beer, Tashi gets up and sits directly on the seam between the two hotel beds, which have inexplicably (or perhaps expectedly) been pushed together in the center of the room. In the background of the frame, now visible directly behind where Tashi had been in the foreground, is the Doubles Championship trophy, which the boys quickly abandon on the floor to join Tashi on the bed — Art screen left and Patrick screen right. The scene is diegetically textured by a radio playing Blood Orange’s “Uncle ACE.” (Pun intended; who cares that this song didn’t yet exist in 2006.) Tashi lures both boys to her neck, one kissing her on each side. When she coaxes them to make it a three-way kiss, the boys pull back. But always the coach, Tashi brings them back together as the diegetic sound expands into a full-throttle musical underscore and Tashi leans back to watch Art and Patrick passionately make out. So much for sterile wanking on separate beds. (“Unholy triptych of / My sweet un-careful friends,” sings Blood Orange’s Devonté Hynes.)
In the present day storyline at the core of the film, Patrick and Art trade-off winning the first and second sets in the championship match of the Phil’s Tire Town Challenger Tournament. This functions as a framing device for the rest of the film, which unfolds in flashbacks: Art and Patrick take turns volleying Tashi’s romantic attention back-and-forth. They take turns volleying “success” in professional tennis. They verbally volley in a sauna — Patrick’s “big dick” versus Art’s elite tennis resume. But without Tashi, it is all just as messy and disappointing as teenage boys jerking off on separate beds.
The film’s score is expertly crafted. Reznor and Ross develop three themes for the middle two-thirds of the film, each deployed in antithetical moments. Tashi’s infatuation and subsequent breakup with playing tennis gets to strut a runway at 120 bpms. Her music is objectifying, which is appropriate given how she is introduced when Patrick says, “she’s the hottest woman I’ve ever seen.” Her themes feature literal hands clapping for her and a slippery descending vocal sample that is reminiscent of Carmen’s “Habañera” (which feminist musicologist Susan McClary would argue is an inherently sexualizing treatment). We first hear this theme (“Yeah x10”) when Tashi wins in the U.S. Open Junior Championship. The second time (“Stopper”) antithetically underscores her career-ending injury.
A second theme is raw EDM computer music that amplifies the sexual competition between Tashi and Patrick. Their intimacy is no deeper than sex in a club. It is physical, unrelenting, and void of a soul beyond a fast (145 bpms) driving rhythm. Again, Reznor and Ross use related, but opposing moments to deploy this musical theme: “Brutalizer” when Tashi and Patrick fight in Tashi’s dorm room versus “Brutalizer 2” when the two hook up in Atlanta behind Art’s back.
The third theme is the most musically complex, and it’s used to develop Art’s obsession over Patrick’s sexual relationship with Tashi. When teenage Art asks Patrick if he slept with Tashi, we get “The Signal.” Again, it’s EDM, but this theme interlaces three distinct musical gestures, two of which directly reference Tashi’s objectifying tennis theme. There’s a laid-back, driving rhythm (around 120 bpms like Tashi’s). There’s also another descending melodic gesture, like Tashi’s, but less slippery and more muscologically masculine due to its simplicity (just four pitches) and focus on a point of arrival — the final and lowest pitch is repeated, as if to say, “I’m finished now.” The last ingredient is a disjunct melodic alarm effect that sounds a bit like a tornado siren, increasing in intensity as it leaps across intervals. This theme returns a second time with “The Points That Matter” to underscore the aforementioned sauna argument, where Patrick realizes Art doesn’t know about the Atlanta hookup. For Art, both moments raise alarm bells and also catalyze him to become a better tennis player.
Interspersed with the original score are classical vocal pieces, each evoking a form of childlike innocence within the adult trio. In the cold open while Patrick and Art are on opposite sides of the tennis court, we hear Henry Purcell’s “Sound the Trumpet,” an antiphonal work for two treble voices and basso continuo, which would have historically been performed with one singer on either side of the stage. When Tashi sits beneath a tree, grieving the end of her tennis career, we hear Benjamin Britten’s piano and high voice setting of “O Waly, Waly,” a Scottish folk tune with lyrics like, “I leaned my back up against some oak / Thinking that he was a trusty tree; / But first he bended and then he broke / And so did my false love to me.” When Tashi checks on her sleeping daughter (who is presumably Art’s child, but whose age suggests she was conceived around the time Tashi and Patrick hooked up in Atlanta) the night before the Tire Town Challenger final, we hear Britten’s “A New Year Carol” from Friday Afternoons, Opus 7, a setting for children’s choir and harp, telling of “the reign of Fair Maid” (Tashi, right?) who brings “new water from the well so clear” for this “happy New Year” of the trio’s symbiotic tennis relationship.
The film reaches its climax when present-day Art, who is married to Tashi, realizes through a bit of clever visual storytelling, that Patrick fucked Tashi the night before the Challenger final. It turns out that the match among the three isn’t over, which is exactly the siren song Art and Patrick need to bring out their best tennis yet. Art gives away a few unjustly earned points to even-up the match in a tie-break; love-all, indeed.
And this is where Reznor and Ross bring the score to a new level of kinetic energy with “Challengers: Match Point.” The music harkens to a dance club, evoking the sensation of getting lost in the music and disappearing into oblivion — sweat, sex, and rhythm the only realities as bodies collide. Just as Tashi said about her own Junior Championship tennis match, perched atop her moonlit siren’s rock on the shore: “For about fifteen seconds, we were actually playing tennis. We understood each other completely. So did everyone watching. It was like we were in love. Or like we didn’t exist. We went somewhere really beautiful together.” L’oeuf, love. Same thing.
