Chevalier

Synopsis: Six men compete in a game to see who is” the best” while sailing on a luxury yacht in the Aegean Sea.

If one can draw any conclusions about a nation from its films then you'd have to say that Greek society is profoundly neurotic. Yorgos Lanthimos takes the cake with his dark allegories Dogtooth (2009) and The Lobster (2015) but with Chevalier director Athina Rachel Tsangari keeps him very good company.  That her co-writer, Efthymis Filippou also wrote Dogtooth on which Tsangari was an associate producer comes as no surprise.  Although this film is less overtly bizarre than Lanthimos's films all are strangely off-kilter stories about personal and societal repression. The difference here is that the emphasis is on the banality of the situation.  To say the least, very little happens in Chevalier.

Ships have long served as metaphors for society. Here we have five well-to-do males (the sixth, Dimitris, winningly played by Makis Papadimitrou, is the overweight, un-macho brother of one of the men who has been brought along as an indulgence) on a catered nautical expedition doing manly things – spear-fishing, jet-skiing and so on with “Doc” (Yiorgos Kendros) their apparent host and master-of-ceremonies. There is also a trio of crew members and a captain who we only ever hear periodically over the P.A.

The film starts unremarkably with the men emerging from the water and comparing the sizes of their catches, as you do.  Then evening  comes and they can’t find any way to amuse themselves so one of them suggests that they compete to see who is “Best In General”.  At the end of the game, the winner will be awarded a Chevalier signet ring.  And so the men set about comparing themselves to each other.  Not on feats of strength or derring-do but on trivial activities like brushing their teeth, assembling Ikea furniture and, of course, eventually literally comparing their masculinities. As time wears on and the ship approaches harbour, tempers fray as the men fight over how to assess who is “best”.

I imagine that Greek audiences will relate more to the chronic machismo and thus the film will have for them more satirical resonance than for less oppressed audiences. Tsangari adopts an arms' length point of view, not trying for men-behaving-badly laughs (the Dimitris character does afford her some opportunity for humour) but exploiting the confined setting of the boat to accentuate the men’s insecurities, another device familiar from many boat and submarine movies, all the while suggesting a pervasively burgeoning homo-erotic tension.

The result is a wryly amusing affair, in it’s own way quite brilliantly pulled off (it won Best Film at the 2015 London Film Festival and had it been made 30 years ago at the height of the feminist movement it would have been hailed a masterpiece), although if you’ve seen Dogtooth or The Lobster and were not amused, it will not be the film for you.

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