With the shimmering waters of Lake Maggiore beckoning mere blocks from Locarno's cinemas and the heat here wilting and cruel, how teasing for Athina Rachel Tsangari to set her much-anticipated third film, Chevalier , entirely on a luxury yacht bobbing in the Aegean. I believe many of us have high hopes for Tsangari, a Greek filmmaker who rose to prominence producing Yorgos Lanthimos's Dogtooth and Alps and directing Attenburg , which was far superior to Lanthimos's Greek films, and similarly in this nouveau Greek cinema style of blending art cinema with conceptual art.
I wondered, as many no doubt did, at Chevalier 's absence from Cannes whose competition included Lanthimos's leap to English production, The Lobster and Venice, which had previously supported this new, provocative Greek cinema. Was the film too daring for these wary red carpet competitions? The answer is no; in fact, Chevalier is a far more approachable film—slyly so—than Attenberg , and the answer to the question of festival placement politics may be that rather than a leap forward from the director, she has made a small-scale chamber farce at sea.
Exchanging Attenberg 's female duo for a quintet of wealthy men vacationing on this glorious yacht, they fish, they swim, fine dine, and so on, almost ready to head back to Athens when, on the last night and after several lame attempts at recreation, someone proposes a game called "the best at everything in general. Included amongst these judgements—how a man sleeps, whether he smokes, how he makes a sea urchin salad—are several petty challenges, imaginative and otherwise, which are also judged: dick pics, how one lies to a loved one, the speed at which one can build an Ikea-like shelving unit.
If you are familiar with Attenberg and the films of Lanthimos this may sound familiar: a closed social group who tacitly agree to follow strange rules of an even stranger game, and in the engagement with these rituals and rules the people adhering to them not only appear absurd, but the absurdity implicitly criticizes the external social or political structures these games are meant to parody slantwise.
So indeed, an all male group of wealthy layabouts amusing themselves with arbitrary judgements that they are by turns over-invested in and totally dismissive of, all while floating offshore of Athens seemingly a world away from anything actually happening in Greece: here clearly is a surrealist allegory of the fluid nonchalance of self-governing patriarchy. This is, to be honest, somewhat expected of this film and others like it. What is surprising is that Tsangari and her co-writer Efthymis Filippou, who also co-wrote The Lobster keep the absurdity from transgressing into the truly bizarre; whereas films like Alps and Attenberg pushed its characters' play past a point of "plausible" drama and into a realm performance art, Chevalier keeps its earnest silliness in check, so the strangest elements, such as the five black monoliths left on board after the shelf-building competition, or an impromptu lip-syncing performance, are hardly as alienating as one would expect from this filmmaker, especially considering her previous short film, The Capsule.
