Another week, another cycle of film fans bemoaning the state of cinema. It often seems like the halcyon days of movie-going is long past. There’s nothing to whet the adult filmgoer’s appetite for art or entertainment, just regurgitated IP. Except, in the last year, both Past Lives and Challengers have stepped in to fill that void. The two films have won critical acclaim and impressive box office draws for their low budgets through their fresh, ingenious storytelling. They’ve also got something else in common.
It’s hard not to read into the fact that Celine Song, the writer-director of Past Lives, and Justin Kuritzkes, the screenwriter behind Challengers, are married in real life. Sure, you might think that Song’s 2023 tender tale of childhood sweethearts reconnecting and Kuritzkes’s steamy tennis flick feel tonally opposite on paper, but they’re both about a woman finding herself torn between her dutiful husband and rediscovered first love.
However, if you had the strange luck — as I did last week — to watch Past Lives and Challengers within 24 hours of each other, those similarities only feel all the more pronounced. Challengers begins to feel like an incredibly hot and romantic rejoinder to the heartache explored in Past Lives. Furthermore, Song’s depiction of a marriage very much inspired by her relationship with Kuritzkes takes on a new, secret charge when you see what’s actually cooking in her husband’s head.
For the unfamiliar, Past Lives tells the fictional story of Nora Moon (Greta Lee), a talented playwright who left her native South Korea as a young teen to immigrate first to Canada, then the USA. As a girl, she was desperately in love with friend and classmate Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), going so far as to tell her mother she would marry him. The two reconnect via Facebook twelve years later only to have their star-crossed love story once again stymied by reality. Nora meets and marries American writer Arthur (John Magaro). Then, twelve more years later, a recently single Hae Sung travels to New York City to see Nora. The time they spend together forces Nora to confront the what ifs of her life and to meditate on the person she could have been. Spoilers for Past Lives! The final shot of the film follows Nora walking away from the Uber that’s picked Hae Sung up for the airport and she winds up sobbing in Arthur’s welcoming arms.
It’s worth noting here, though, that the movie is based Song’s own personal experience reconnecting with her Korean childhood sweetheart in New York City. In the movie version of events, Nora embraces the bittersweet reality of her charmed life with her devoted husband Arthur. Her connection with Hae Sung is more than just a path not taken; it’s a life she did not live, at least not yet.
Challengers, on the other hand, is something of a psycho-sexual fairy tale. A deep-seated love triangle between young tennis phenoms Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), and Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) evolves over the years into a bitter, high stakes rivalry. As teens, Patrick and Art are essentially brothers. When they both pursue rising star Tashi, she seduces them into the start of a threesome. Patrick becomes her boyfriend, but after an intense lovers’ spat, he bails on attending a routine college match. Tashi breaks her leg, ending her dreams of tennis superstardom. Art, however, is there for her. As the years go on, she first becomes his coach and then wife. Patrick’s star dims in the background as Art becomes a six-time grand slam winner. To overcome a losing streak, Tashi suggests Art competes in a lowly Challengers tournament…where the only real competition is none other than the washed up Patrick.
Spoilers for Challengers! While Art and Patrick have spent over a decade of their lives battling for Tashi’s affection — with Tashi promising to leave Art if he loses in his final to Patrick while she secretly goes to Patrick to exchange a night of sex for the promise he’ll throw the match — the euphoric ending reveals Tashi’s ultimate goal was getting Art and Patrick to admit their love for each other. The film ends with the two best friends-turned-nemeses finally playing pure tennis that ends with them dramatically embracing and Tashi erupting in orgasmic delight.
In Kuritzkes’s self-described “pure fantasy,” a tense, lingering love triangle’s ending is…a throuple. There is no fretful choice to be made between two men, two paths, or two lives. No one wins the match and no one loses. All three characters share a moment of incandescent connection. That’s the fantasy version.
In Past Lives, there’s a moment where Arthur asks Nora offhandedly if Hae Sung is “attractive.” Song’s version of the conversation emphasizes Arthur’s jealousy and Nora’s determination to reassure her husband their marriage is sound. After watching Challengers, I wondered if Arthur was instead asking about Hae Sung’s looks for, well, himself.
Okay, yes, Past Lives and Challengers are two very different films. However, they are full of emotional grace notes that rhyme on a potentially subconscious level for their married writers. Tashi and Nora are both aggressively determined women, who commit their personal lives to their chosen professions. Tashi routinely is called out on the fact that the only thing she cares about is tennis, while Nora scoffs at leaving her career as a playwright behind for puppy love. Art and Arthur basically have the same name and the same happily submissive relationship with their wives. Art enlists Tashi to mold him into a tennis champ while Arthur eagerly absorbs everything he can of Nora’s Korean culture. And while the sweet Hae Sung and swaggering Patrick don’t seem all that similar at first glance, they are both men who squandered their early potential. Hae Sung ruefully admits to Nora that he is “ordinary” and Tashi and Art scoff at the adult Patrick’s low status on the ATP rankings. Most importantly, though, both films end in an embrace.
While Celine Song’s elegantly understated Past Lives captures the deep, soulful symmetry that connects its three protagonists, Challengers thrums with desire. One is an honest look at the complexity of love and the other a hyper-stylized descent into ecstasy. Together, they feel like two sides of a conversation. They epitomize the type of otherworldly rapport Tashi describes as defining real tennis in Challengers, or the spiritual connection formed by coincidence that Nora repeatedly refers to as In Yun, or the idea that anyone who crosses your path in this life meant something to you in a past life, in Past Lives.
Song and Kuritzkes may not have intended their scripts to be a compelling peak into their own love story, but they play perfectly side-by-side just the same. And that’s what’s most romantic about it.
