Can Zendaya Handle Her Challengers? New Trailer Says Yes

Cinephilic tennis fans have, over the years, found very few occasions to enjoy their sport on the silver screen. There was, famously, Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, the sub-subgenre’s sole classic, in the 1970s the execrable Players (a film with excellent tennis action and nearly no actual drama, and a few middling whiffs in the decades to follow, excepting perhaps Woody Allen’s clever but now-squickier Match Point and a couple of Billie Jean King biopics led by Holly Hunter and Emma Stone. And oh, yes, some dude won an Oscar, I guess, for playing a player’s father, and almost lost it. Go figure. Anyway, here comes another challenger. Or, make that, Challengers, starring Zendaya, Zendaya, and more Zendaya.

MGM’s first trailer for the September release from Luca Guadagnino (Call Me by Your Name, the 2017 Suspiria remake), steps up to toe the line with Zendaya playing tennis star Tashi Duncan. The trailer’s first minute charts her meteoric rise to the top of the game with a few wild bolo-whip forehands unlike any the sport has ever seen (a crazy combo of a Del Potro heat-seeking straight-arm missile with a Rafa-esque round-the-head follow-through that has some pros shaking their heads). Zendaya and her co-leads spent a summer training under former pro, coach, and commentator Brad Gilbert’s tutelage learning to crack the famed “fearhand.” So we shall see if the tennis passes muster. (If you get that pun you are a serious fan.)

Tennis aside, the trailer is clearly more interested in teasing her potential ménage à trois with boyfriend Patrick (Josh O’Connor) and his best friend Art (Mike Faist) as she sits on a bed between them, taking her turns kissing each, before before being kissed back simultaneously by both and sporting a sly smile in the afterglow. Some relationship drama ensues before Tashi’s career appears cut short by a knee injury and an exaggerated accompanying Foley effect suited to lightning striking a tree branch. Crack!

“Years later,” the journey continues, as Tashi now coaches her now-husband Art, a champion whose losing streak has her taking up a tactic that once worked for Andre Agassi when he fell to no. 141 in the world: dipping down to the lowest level of pro events to play a “challenger,” where points are scarce and prize money scant but pride still remains on the line. And who does Art face? No one other than Patrick, washed-up as a player but still hungry. “You don’t know what tennis is,” says Tashi. “It’s a relationship.”

Is it? I am not sure in five decades of playing and watching I’ve heard that before. The trailer focuses on the relationship between the three as Tashi, Art, and Patrick all have their careers at stake. Whether the film can take the sport seriously remains to be seen. Most tennis films have been execrable at executing a simulacrum of the sport. Players, surprisingly, was quite good, with its all-star cast of cameos and access to the game’s inner circle. A recent French film, Final Set, featured fairly spectacular and wholly credible court action, but for the most part, if you are looking for a believable presentation of tennis on screen, you are better off watching documentaries like The French.

But that’s not what Challengers really looks to be about: Zendaya called it a “sexy comedy,” and Guadagnino’s film looks set to deliver the juicy melodrama of a love triangle with its emotions heightened by the fever pitch of competition. It may not hew to the real life of drudgery on the challenger circuit—a place no star player wants to inhabit for long—but it just might keep general audiences and a legion of Euphoria-addled Zendaya fans enraptured when it arrives.