Movie Review: Chevalier

Chevalier

Directed by: Athina Rachel Tsangari.

Written by: Efthymis Filippou & Athina Rachel Tsangari.

Starring: Yiorgos Kendros (The Doctor), Panos Koronis (Yorgos), Vangelis Mourikis (Josef), Makis Papadimitriou (Dimitris), Yorgos Pirpassopoulos (Yannis), Sakis Rouvas (Christos).

The premise of Chevalier is so good that it takes a while for the effect of it to wear off, and you start to realize that the film really isn’t doing all that much with that premise. You keep expect Chevalier to reach the next level, but co-writer/director Athina Rachel Tsangari – the talented filmmaker behind Attenberg (2010), a weird, surreal, disturbing comedic look at a warped father/daughter relationship, which garnered attention on the festival circuit, and places her alongside the other major Greek discovery of recent years – Yorgos Lanthimos (Dogtooth, Alps, The Lobster). I didn’t think Attenberg was great, but it was good, and made me very curious to see what Tsangari does next. Chevalier isn’t as good as Attenberg – it doesn’t really work very well – but it still makes me curious to see what she’s going to do next.

The film is about six Greek men, vacationing on a yacht. They are all, one assumes, well-off – or at least better off than most of their fellow countrymen, since they are vacationing on a yacht after all. Most of the men go diving – there is one guy, they don’t trust to do so, who is so desperate to be liked by the rest, that they don’t respect him. After their latest dive, they discuss what to do next – decide against cards, one has serious problems with Trivial Pursuit for some reason, before they decide instead on a series of games which will once and for all determine which of the men is the “best at everything” – the winner of which will get the much discussed Chevalier ring. The contests go about how you would expect them to – they start out in good fun, but ends up devolving fairly quickly into petty games of one-upmanship, where the insecurities of everyone are put on display for all to see.

Male insecurity drives so much of modern culture – particularly online, where even the idea of women being allowed to bust ghosts in subject to insane, misogyny – and is talked about a great deal. Yet, rarely is it depicted in the way it is in Chevalier, where the whole thing does eventually – obviously – descend into a literal dick measuring contest. The men in the movie are petty and vain, and are all essentially assholes – and they aren’t young either, so that’s no excuse (one of them is approaching retirement – the rest are firmly in middle age, or headed that way). Yet get them together on a boat, with nothing to do, and they’ll act like lunkheaded teenage idiots.

The problem with Chevalier is though, that once Tsangari establishes that, she doesn’t really have anywhere else to do with her film. The film is deliberately kept low-key – she doesn’t ramp up either the comedy nor the drama, the characters remain archetypes instead of people, and we essentially see one scene after another of them attempting some silly competition that doesn’t really prove anything, no matter how seriously they take it (my favorite is when they have to build a shelf, that looks like it came from Ikea). There is a lot of talk about erections and virility – one guy even struts around the boat, late one night when he is finally able to get an erection, offering to fuck anyone to prove how strong he is. By the end, real and metaphorical blood will have been spilled (the real stuff, probably not in the way you expect it to).

I liked some of Chevalier – I think Tsangari remains an interesting filmmaker to watch. I liked the visual look of the film, which is basically the opposite of Richard Linklater’s Greece set Before Midnight (that Tsangari had a small role in – and was one of the producers). That film captured Greece in all its romantic, magic hour glory. Tsangari was to make everything as bland as possible – there is, after all, no romance here. I also appreciate the overall view of the men in the movie – in Hollywood, when they make films like this, the men are painted as lovable idiots, who just need the love of a good (impossibly good looking) woman to force them to grow up. In Chevalier, Tsangari knows that’s impossible – these men will always be like this. If she had made Chevalier into a half hour short, it may have been brilliant – or if she had found a way to take the film to another level as it progresses, the same thing could have been true. But she didn’t really – so the film remains one with a great premise that squanders it.

Movie Review: Attenberg

Attenberg
Directed by: Athina Rachel Tsangari.
Written by: Athina Rachel Tsangari.
Starring: Ariane Labed (Marina), Giorgos Lanthimos (Engineer), Vangelis Mourikis (Spyros), Evangelia Randou (Bella).

The Greek film Attenberg invites comparisons to another Greek film – Dogtooth – made the year before this one in two ways. It directly makes us think of the earlier film by casting Giorgos Lanthimos, the director of Dogtooth, in a key role in this film. And it indirectly reminds us of Dogtooth, because at the heart of each film is a strange, perhaps perverse, familial relationship. The family at the heart of Dogtooth – run by a megalomaniac father who refuses to let his kids off of their large estate, only to be undone when the outside world starts encroaching upon them – was screwed up. But the father-daughter relationship in Attenberg is also clearly dysfunctional in many ways.

Attenberg opens with Marina (Ariane Labed) and her best friend Bella (Evangelia Randou) is a strange scene, where Marina admits she has never “done that” – which in this case means kissing. Bella indulges her friend, and the two kiss – but people hoping for an erotic moment will be disappointed – yes, the two beautiful women kiss, but it purposefully lacks any real eroticism. Marina has no idea what to do, and it shows.

You are right to wonder how a beautiful 23 year old woman like Marina has never kissed anyone before – but then we meet her father and things start to make more sense. The first thing we hear Marina ask her dad is “Do you ever think about me naked?” – and although he says of course not, he doesn’t strike the admonishing tone we would expect a father to answer that question to his grown daughter. Clearly these two have a close relationship – even far too close – but we don’t really know how far it goes. Marina talks about how she never thinks about sex – the thought disgusts her, some man pumping inside her like a piston. What 23 year old talks to her dad this way?

Whatever their relationship truly is, her father Spyros (Vangelis Mourikis) is now dying – and knows he needs to get his daughter out there in the real world. Although it is never mentioned in the film, I couldn’t help but think that Bella may have been hired by Spyros to be Marina’s friend. It is mentioned several times that Bella is a “loose” woman, and near the end, she thinks nothing of sleeping with Spyros at Marina’s request. Could she be a prostitute hired by Spyros to try and dissuade Marina’s attitudes about sex? Sometimes all Marina and Bella do is Monty Python style walks, which gives the film some strange, comedic moments.

The other major character is an Engineer, played by director Lanthimos. Encouraged by her father, and Bella, to try sex, Marina meets him, and the two slowly initiate sexual contact – slowly at first, and then getting more and more involved.

Throughout all of this, Marina is also dealing with the imminent death of her father – who has some strange (for Greeks) requests – like being cremated, which only recently became legal there, and is still a lengthy ordeal.

I was drawn in by Attenberg, without ever really loving it. Like Lanthimos’ follow-up to Dogtooth, Alps, Attenberg is a film that is fascinating in its weirdness, but is probably more interesting to talk about than it is to actually watch. But writer-director Athina Rachel Tsangari is certainly a talent to watch for in the coming year. Along with Lanthimos, she may be the beginning of a New Wave of Greek filmmakers.