Chevalier

A typical men's trip. Six guys, a luxury yacht, the Aegean. Fishing, good food, playing tough on a jet ski. Middle-aged men, apart from one elderly gentleman, all comfortably well off. Six men together, what do you get? Right: competition, always proving yourself to be right, looking who's got the longest. Especially when one of them suggests playing a game: Best at Everything. The winner gets the old man’s signet ring, as knights used to wear: the ‘chevalier’.
Alongside heavyweight Yorgos Lanthimos, whose Dogtooth (2009) she once produced, Athina Rachel Tsangari again reveals herself in her third feature (a second, Attenberg, was screened in 2011 at IFFR) to be one of the new masters of the Greek Weird Wave. She takes a familiar situation and carries it to absurdist extremes in unemotional images filled with deadpan acting. It’s that amplification that both hilariously and confrontationally exposes human nature. Also see The Slow Business of Going (2000) in the programme ID: The Generic Self.