Dual Review: Robot Dreams and Challengers
A delightful robot-dog relationship dramedy, and a decidedly less delightful tennis relationship dramedy.
I’ve been in a bit of a funk lately. Finals and the general ups and downs of life have sapped all the writing juices out of me, so all the pieces I’d planned (including a retrospective Luca review and a thing on my favorite screwball comedies, both of which I plan on writing eventually) have stalled in a kind of development hell. Now that finals are over though I’m gonna try to get back into rhythm of things by reviewing two new releases.
I’ll start off with the delightful, quaint, ceaselessly pleasant Academy Award nominee, Robot Dreams, which is set to be released in North America by NEON on May 31st (a full year after its premiere at Cannes!). Written and directed by Spanish filmmaker Pablo Berger, and based on a graphic novel by Sara Varon, it follows a lonely dog (named… Dog) who, after seeing an advertisement, decides to buy a robot-companion (guess this one’s name). Dog and Robot become fast friends — maybe more than friends? — until one day, after an afternoon at the beach, Robot’s lack of battery-power forces Dog to leave him behind on the shore. Dog tries to return for his metallic compadre, but, as if by some inauspicious divine intervention, the beach is closed for the season. Days turn into weeks, and eventually, into months, so on, so forth.
Berger’s choice to do away with any dialogue (I’m not sure if the graphic novel is this way as well) works wonders. The expressiveness of the characters and the minimal voice work from Ivan Labanda (who provides sound for not only Dog and Robot, but various other passing characters as well) convey so much already that words would’ve probably been a minor addition, if not entirely superfluous. There are several sequences that have been wedged into my mind just through their use of sound, music, and COLOR (!!!). The two I’m thinking of in particular are a scene with a family of songbirds and aWizard of Oz homage; these sequences — especially the former — provide the film’s emotional apexes.
I guess the best way to describe Robot Dreams would be that it’s the ultimate comfort-movie, bolstered by a host of charming anthropomorphic animal characters. The simple hand-drawn animation brings to mind memories of Saturday morning cartoons; the soundtrack — featuring one very significant needledrop — is full of easygoing, recognizable bops (there was actually a lot of literal head bopping at my theater); the musings on how relationships — or rather, how even one short-lived relationship specifically — can change the course of one’s life, for better and worse, are so universal that they’ll hit home with practically anyone (hence the central characters being a dog and a robot). Perhaps this all sounds a bit too twee — I can admit that sometimes I appreciated Robot Dreams’ open-heartedness more than I felt it, especially in the middle stretch. Overall though, I was very easily won over by this film, and I suspect most people will be as well. See it with a crowd; you’ll laugh together, bop together, and walk out of the theater pretending you didn’t cry together.
Billed simultaneously as Zendaya’s first traditional movie-star vehicle and as a “sexy tennis romp” (at least, according the Rotten Tomatoes critic consensus) that’s bringing some much-needed sensuality (and, apparently, sweatiness) back into mainstream American cinema, Challengers was probably my most anticipated U.S. film this year. The trailer (featuring Rihanna’s “S&M”) didn’t fill me with confidence, but the sheer amount of hype and the enthusiastic reaction in the weeks leading up to and after its release gave me some hope. So, when I sat down in that empty theater on a Thursday evening in May, I felt something close to excitement, and my expectations were fairly high. Unfortunately, I left that theater let down.
Written by playwright Justing Kuritzkes and directed by Luca Guadagnino, we follow Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), wealthy tennis wunderkinds and best friends who become infatuated with prodigy Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) after meeting her at a competition. They play for her number, Patrick wins, and the two start dating. Fast forward 13 years later, Tashi, having suffered a knee injury and no longer able to play, makes a name for herself by coaching her husband: Art. The film bounces to and fro in time, highlighting key moments in the trio’s relationship from 2006 to 2019, where Patrick and Art are playing a Challenger event (hence the title) with Tashi as a witness.
This non-linear narrative structure is the source of most of the film’s issues. By eliding so much time and reducing so many unseen periods into explanations, the characters tend to feel flat, teetering on dull (and oh so talkative). Details about the characters’ lives are mentioned and then dropped without giving the viewer or the characters themselves any time to really feel anything about them: Patrick and Art’s affluent upbringings; Tashi being the breadwinner for her family at 18; Patrick’s fall from a rich, budding star to a down-on-his-luck player living in his car. I could go on. Though I’d imagine all of these things are pretty significant to the people on screen, we’re informed of them only in passing. It doesn’t help that Kuritzkes’ dialogue is frequently quite corny (please excuse the terrible word, I couldn’t think of another).
I guess the reason for the lack of substantial background is because the main drawing point here is really the sexual tension (there’s no explicit on-screen sex — the closest we get is the three-way make out scene that’s been all over the film’s promotional materials) in the love triangle, but when the characters are as bland and unfeeling as these lot, that’ll, of course, trickle down into the chemistry of the actors. The performances from the leads are all varying degrees of good, but no one is really selling the sex — or rather, the (sometimes homo)eroticism — that the film has been touted as having in abundance. Faist and O’Connor come close, however, their interactions are limited by the film’s narrative structure. Zendaya is something of a conundrum; she’s absolutely hilarious, has excellent physicality (her tennis scenes are the most believable), and carries a magnetic screen presence, especially in the younger scenes. That said, she rarely pulls off older Tashi’s stoicism, nor does she have much chemistry with either of her “little white boys,” qualities I’m inclined to blame on the fact that Tashi is simply a threadbare character; a stereotypical ice-queen who lives and breathes tennis to the point where she seemingly thinks of nothing else, even mid-coitus. This could’ve been interesting, but again, the script’s structure, and general lack of interest in her inner life, holds her back.
Guadagnino is a director who, in the past, I’ve admired more than liked — his determination to avoid being boxed in any sort of “type” is commendable, but, aside from 2022’s Bones and All, his films haven’t done much for me on a deeper level. Surprisingly though, I found his presence to be one of the better aspects of this latest venture. He and his collaborators take some pretty gonzo swings (haha, get it?), and most pay off: the craziest (and by far the best) of these is Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ brilliant, pounding techno/house score, which sounds like it came from a much more energetic movie. There’s also Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s vibrant cinematography, which gets increasingly acrobatic as the film goes on (at one point in the climactic match, the camera takes the POV of a tennis ball flying across the net), and Marco Costa’s fast-paced editing that imitates the back-and-forth of a tennis rally. While the inspiration behind these choices is on-the-nose, and I certainly didn’t love all them (the obvious reasoning for the excessive use of slo-mo and the blocking of this scene doesn’t make them look or feel less awkward) I respected the guts, and found myself wishing that they were attached to a better screenplay.