Chevalier

The plot is that six friends all go on a luxury trip aboard a yacht in the Aegean Sea. They do all the things you are supposed to do like scuba diving, eating rich sea food and water sports, but they soon start to get on each other's nerves. Then one of them has an idea of a new game. This is to find out who is 'best' and this they will do by coming up with competitions with which they can collectively judge each other. By the time they hit port they can tot up the scores and the winner gets to wear the Chevalier ring.

Then the fun begins and these middle aged men soon let their inner demons out as competitiveness rears its ugly head and all too quickly it is every man for himself – in a very restrained way of course.

Now this is a comedy but for me it was long on good ideas but short on laughs. There are a few but not scattered liberally. The acting is all great and the crew are as relevant as the main players and indeed injected a dimension that keeps this from becoming 'becalmed' – to use a nautical reference. It did keep me interested until the end, but I still feel I am being generous with my score. In Greek with good subtitles – this is an original film that hopefully will float your boat.

The so called "Greek Weird Wave" returns with another entry, this time a comedy directed by Athina Rachel Tsangari (best known for ''Attenberg"). The co-writer of "Dogtooth" and "The Lobster" Filippou assists her efforts to make an unconventionally funny and somewhat disturbing comedy. As the jury in London Film Festival (Best Film award for the movie there) stated "Chevalier is a study of male antagonism seen through the eyes of a brave and original filmmaker. With great formal rigour and irresistible wit, Athina Rachel Tsangari has managed to make a film that is both a hilarious comedy and a deeply disturbing statement on the condition of western humanity". Well, that's accurate but the formal rigour in all (post)modern Greek movies is getting a bit tiring and the movie is a funny comedy but not really a hilarious one. Yet the film is probably a bit better that George Lanthimos' uneven last entry "The Lobster". So if you are a Greek Weird Wave fan you should check it out and a few good laughs are guaranteed.

Grade: B-

The film is about a bunch of men overtly engaging in comparing their status and worth. This sounds as comedic a premise as any, but the director is quite restrained and doles out the funnies in a languid tempo (although there is certainly a climax to the proceedings). The writing is very good, and takes care to provide details that deftly flesh out the characters: these are not rah-rah bros, the relationships among them are subtle and fuel much of the action. The actors are quite brilliant, always shy of hamming it up, perhaps tellingly so.

This is what I found most impressive about the film, the sense of director's control of the material. You could milk this premise for a lot of cheap laughs, but the film feels free to go broad or subtle, just hint at hilarious episodes, take the time to enjoy the view from the boat, linger a while at the harbour before going back home. At all times however the perspective is assured, the characters are never made fun of, and the viewer is invited to witness as much silliness as they like.

I am docking a bunch of points because all this restraint on balance does gets a bit draining, but I think that everyone will enjoy the time spent at the company of these gentlemen.

Whoever thought this was good comedy material may need to think about other ways of making a living. The combination of writer, Efthymis Filipou and director Athina Rachel Tsangari (also co-writer) proves to be far from satisfying - other than for the easily pleased. How many times have we seen this stale scenario played out on stage and screen – a group of middle aged 'buddies' away on a luxury fishing trip who, begin to become bored with each other's company and decide to find ways of 'entertaining' themselves at each other's expense. The hapless viewer knows the superficial direction this is taking within minutes of playtime IE; Who of them is the best, the biggest, the most successful, the most, etc, etc,....absolutely nothing new here, in fact, it's all presented in a lack-lustre derogatory formula that drags on far too long.

Only self-congratulatory festival critics could rave on so about works of this caliber. If you're inclined to follow the trending rants of Sundance and other world film festivals you might have a chance staying awake through this lame offering. Either the director or cinematographer or both, waste the settings and situations with boring in-focus-out-of-focus on deck exercise machine discussions, not once but twice, as if they have just discovered the use of photographic depth of field. The cast of handpicked performers try to inject life into old situations but are doomed to morose failure by a suss script and heavy-handed direction. If this is supposed to be an intellectual character study then it sure needs a lot of explaining.

While some of the soundtrack music selections are good within themselves, they just don't suit the story. I have no trouble believing the comments made by the reviewer from the Netherlands who wrote; "The cinema they attended was packed for the beginning and half empty by the mid-way point" - the viewers voted with their feet. Only on SBS and the trash-fest of World Movies would you find this 'entertainment' non-event. Sorry Greece, if this is regarded as one of your years best you may have a problem.

This film has the six men on a diving and fishing trip in the Greek islands (accompanied by three, later two, staff on the boat) getting into a competition game about finding out who is the "best in general" among them. While they do some specific competitions, in principle all their behavior down to the tiniest detail is up for rating by the others. We see them taking notes about each other all the time, and most conversations somehow circle around their game; but because the game involves everything, whatever they talk about is by definition part of the game. Besides the interactions and communication, we get some very well done cinematography both of the wonderful setting and the men and their boat that at times can be read as comment on what goes on between them.

The idea of the film is original and fascinating, and the comedy and more serious aspects here work very well together. This is one of the films where humour comes from precise observation of the characteristics and psychology of the protagonists, their conflicts, and from realizing how ridiculous human interaction can be, while at the same time trying to be credible and even deep (different viewers may have different ideas about how realistic and credible all this is but my life experience doesn't make it seem all too outlandish; certainly the temptation of rating and competition on just about anything is very familiar to me).

The film can make you think about competition, masculinity, the obsession of the postmodern society with quantification and rating and its impact, what "criteria" one can think of to rate a person, the role of sexuality, how different protagonists take different aspects of the game seriously, how hard it is to stay outside when things become really tense, and the meaning of the impact the game has on the boat staff.

My quibble with the realism of all this is probably that irony and sarcasm are largely left to the director and the audience but are in critically short supply among the protagonists (which is a problem in many films; from the distance of a director's chair it seems to be very difficult to imagine how people are at times able to observe an ironical distance from themselves). I can in fact easily imagine things to become as tense as they do in the film, but I'd expect the men to at least attempt/pretend to take things in a more light and bantery manner while they get there; although there's obviously a comic effect for the audience in their seriousness.

Apart from this I was fine with the acting, and I had certainly enough to laugh, given that the film has plenty of qualities apart from humour. This is a pretty good and (as far as I know) unique film and I recommend it to everyone who likes the combination of wit, psychology and food for thought that we get here.

This is my first review and already I find myself dithering about whether I should rate this 8 or 9, I say 8.5 rounded up.