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There Are Actually Two Almost-Threesomes in Challengers
One’s in a hotel room and the other’s on the tennis court.
That’s why the abortive-threesome sequence is less a tease than an open parenthesis, one that’s only closed once the movie, which is peppered with flashbacks from its 13-year timespan, catches up with itself and focuses entirely on the end of a match between the now-grown Art and Patrick at a rinky-dink tournament in New Rochelle. When Art and Patrick first meet Tashi at the Junior US Open, where they’re left as slack-jawed by her backhand as her beauty, they’re tennis-academy roommates and doubles partners who share a codependent closeness more often depicted in teenage girls. When she does swing by their shared Flushing hotel room (the settings in Challengers are a gloriously unatmospheric slew of chain lodging, strip-mall restaurants, and parking lots), it’s obvious that she’s going to dictate the terms of whatever might take place, but also that she hasn’t yet decided what that might be.
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