Challengers
/On its way to theatres in a few weeks is Challengers, a sports-romance film about a love triangle surrounding tennis star-turned-coach Tashi (Zendaya). The film’s second official trailer is cut to a remix of Canadian pop star Nelly Furtado’s song “Maneater” from her 2006 album Loose.
I enjoy it when trailers are edited to take a diegetic sound (one the characters in the film would hear) and use it in a musical way. Right out of the gate, this trailer takes the sound of a racket hitting a ball, timed to the beat of the music, to develop a groove. The trailer opens and we hear a back-and-forth rhythm between the sound of a tennis ball being slammed and a bass drum. In the first 10 seconds there are 5 notes between these two sounds, with each note synched to visual cuts introducing the three characters of the love triangle (Tashi, Patrick and Art), naturally beginning with Zendaya, and in slow motion.
At 0:12, a reverse cymbal swell builds intensity leading us to an accent on a large reverberant drum, kicking off the downbeat of a groove which sets up the driving dance tempo of “Maneater.” Watch how, two measures into this new groove, at 0:15, the percussive sounds of slammed tennis balls are synched to create a drum fill - brilliant! At 0:18 Tashi’s on-court scream of “Come on!” is synched to the downbeat.
From 0:12-0:26, the music gets louder, kick drum is added, synth layers grow, and more high-end frequencies are added to the mix (a classic EDM build-up trick). This leads us to a cut to musical silence at 0:26 to highlight the moment of Tashi’s career-ending injury, audibly marked by a crunch. An intertitle is shown and the music begins to build again, now using the catchy synth hook from the verses of “Maneater.”
It is not until 0:49 that we finally hear Nelly Furtado’s voice, singing “She’s a maneater,” as we see a close-up of Tashi smiling in the midst of a sexual moment. Furtado’s vocals are isolated from the track’s instrumentation for this moment, in a wash of reverb. From 0:52-1:03, the trailer transitions to the bridge of “Maneater” where Furtado repeats the line “You wish you’d never ever met her at all.” However, the music here is mixed differently than in the commercially released version of “Maneater.” While the instrumentation is still at a strong volume, the vocals are turned way down in the mix, in order to make more space for the four lines of dialogue that require our sonic attention here.
Never fear, Nelly Furtado fans, this trailer won’t completely disappoint your appetite for her powerful vocals. From 1:10-1:21 there are no lines of dialogue so we are treated to a taste of the chorus of “Maneater” at full volume and in full glory as the actors playing the three protagonists are introduced in intertitles. At 1:24 we cut to musical silence again, to leave space for more dialogue, making it possible to then skip ahead in “Maneater” - returning to the bridge, now with vocals at full volume. Compare the volume of Nelly Furtado’s voice at 0:52 and 1:25 - both moments feature the same section of “Maneater,” but the mix is completely different.
Towards the end of the trailer we have some quality rhythmic synching to create an audio-visual montage and climax. Watch from 1:29-1:39, tap your foot along with the music (follow the bass drum pulse) and notice how there is a visual cut on the beat for 25 consecutive beats. All these quick cuts manage not only to keep the exposition clearly flowing: they also feature diegetic sounds synched to the beat (racket and face slapping at 1:37) as we see Tashi resolutely work through her crisis.
This trailer is a great case study of how the catchy elements of a licensed pop hit can be isolated and used sparsely and tastefully in a trailer in order to provide the energy and nostalgia of the original pop song, without giving the pop song so much space that it diverts our attention from the action on screen.
The score for _Challengers _will be provided by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, who shook up the world of film music when they scored The Social Network in 2010 - so we have that to look forward to as well.
Challengers slams into theatres April 26th.
- Jack Hui Litster
