Chevalier
This scathing Greek portrait of masculine insecurity is one of the strangest, funniest films of the year.
Overview
Can you skip stones further than anyone else? Does your sleeping position, coffee preference, cholesterol level, morning erection or the way you wear your pants make you a better man? For six Greek men on a yacht in the Aegean Sea, the answer is a resounding yes. When they become bored with the usual holiday pastimes, the characters in Chevalier devise a tournament to test their masculine prowess. Points are awarded, with the overall champion receiving the titular ring as a symbol of their supremacy. Strange, unsettling hilarity soon ensues.
In her follow up to Attenberg, writer-director Athina Rachel Tsangari begins her film with a spot of fishing, followed by the pals posing for a photo to display their catches. They haven't yet conjured up their contest, but they're already posturing, just as they are when they later turn a dinner chat about which different objects they'd each be into a game. When their heated conversation leads to the idea of battling it out to determine which of them is "the best in general", it's a natural extension of their testosterone-fuelled antics. Before long, literally everything becomes a competition.
It's a concept that straddles the gap between ridiculous and painfully real — an exaggeration of the way men often act, mined for twisted comic effect. Along the way, Tsangari lays bare the group's vanity and insecurity. Most play along, desperate to emerge victorious, except the overweight Dimitris (Makis Papadimitriou). He knows he can't succeed — although, as the film makes plain, there are other ways that a man can be a winner.
Tsangari co-wrote Chevalier with Efthymis Filippou, who also penned Dogtooth, Alps and The Lobster, making the film very much a part of Greece's recent big screen 'weird wave'. Indeed, dissecting human behaviour and the state of national affairs have gone hand in hand in Greek cinema for almost a decade. But Chevalier, in particular, is at once savage and insightful. If it feels as though the film is holding you at an arms length, it's likely intentional. Great performances invest each on-screen figure with the requisite depth, but Tsangari and Filippou are more interested in understanding what makes the characters tick – and what that means about masculinity and our male-dominated society – than they are in eliciting empathy from the audience.
This feeling of analytical distance is reflected in Tsangari's visuals, which are drained of colour, often captured from afar, and peppered with telling shots of the ocean. Frankly, while verbal exchanges and disagreements are crucial to the story, Chevalier would be almost as amusing, feel almost as scathing, and leave nearly as great an impact without any words at all. Let's face it: you don't need dialogue to understand that a literal dick-measuring contests is both hilarious and profoundly sad.
