Cheva­lier

Dick mea­sur­ing on the high seas is the order of play in the lat­est film by Greek direc­tor Athena Rachel Tsan­gari, an abra­sive satire on the inher­ent idio­cy of machis­mo. Six asso­ciates, brought togeth­er aboard a lux­u­ry yacht by a well-heeled doc­tor, push off for the Aegean sea and a sojourn of man­ly pur­suits. But what’s the point of being good at some­thing if you’re not bet­ter than a social equal? Per­son­al worth is rel­a­tive not to achieve­ment, but to con­quer­ing the achieve­ments of oth­ers. Only then you can claim the prize of being able to advise your peers of their inferiority.

It’s not long before the men cot­ton on to this notion, and feel the need for for­malise it, for pros­per­i­ty. A sys­tem is devised where­by each man has their achieve­ments tal­lied and indexed, with the ulti­mate aim of hav­ing a sin­gle vic­tor at the end of the trip. Or, to acknowl­edge its offi­cial title: ​“the best in general.”

Cheva­lier sits very neat­ly in a small clutch of films that have been termed the Greek New Wave, char­ac­terised by its mor­dant humour, an ambiva­lent atti­tude to real­ism, and a feel­ing of sup­pressed vio­lence which could explode at any moment. These men have no empa­thy for one anoth­er, each is dri­ven by self inter­est and a desire to assert his supe­ri­or­i­ty over the oth­ers. Yet this Dadaist cham­pi­onship rejects the old fash­ioned sports­man­ship in favour of look­ing at these men real­ly think about their accom­plish­ments. It’s almost as if Tsan­gari has stripped back the guard-shield of politesse and civil­i­ty in order for her cam­era to catch an unvar­nished, pri­mate real­i­ty that exists just under the surface.

It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing set-up and exe­cut­ed with cool pre­ci­sion, even if it nev­er real­ly shifts into a sec­ond gear. The cen­tral char­ac­ters share many traits, and their essen­tial sim­i­lar­i­ty empha­sis­es the absur­di­ty of their com­pe­ti­tion. What does being the best out of these six slight­ly unhinged men actu­al­ly mean? It’s ques­tion­able whether Tsan­gari envi­sions a life for these men out­side the time­line of the film. We cer­tain­ly don’t care what hap­pens to them, or where they’ve come from to reach this point. While that makes it a tougher film to real­ly get an emo­tion­al hold on, it helps it to be more res­o­nant as a state­ment on life as an unnec­es­sary and illog­i­cal tour­na­ment. Some­times the qui­et dis­cus­sions between the games reveal far more humane traits than do the moments where we’re able to prove we can build IKEA fur­ni­ture faster than some­one else.