If the release of Yorgos Lanthimos' The Lobster left you thinking "Ah ha, now I'm on top of this Greek New Wave business", here comes a new film from Athina Rachel Tsangari to re-bamboozle and disorient.
Chevalier, named Best Film at the most recent London Film Festival, unquestionably shares DNA with The Lobster in its fiercely logical illogic: tellingly, Lanthimos' regular collaborator, Efthimis Filippou, takes a co-writing credit.
Squint and Chevalier looks like a satire on masculine competitiveness, just as Dogtooth parroted family life and The Lobster thumbed its nose at romantic relationships. Six men, including a doctor, the son-in-law he despises, and his daughter's ex-boyfriend, are taking an ill-defined vacation aboard a yacht in the Aegean Sea.
When a guessing game ends in a dispute about subjectivity, the men decide to compete of a series of challenges – Ikea flat-pack assembly, skimming stones, erection sizes – to determine who is the ‘Best in General’. The winner, who will be marked by everyone on everything, will receive the doctor’s chevalier ring.
The film is at its most engaging when dealing with this central plot, or when the men talk to themselves in self-improving mantras: "My thighs aren't fat" or "My stamina has improved since I gave up smoking". But in common with the director's utterly screwy 2011 debut Attenberg, there is yet more weirdness to come. The oddness of the soundtrack – Brahms, Petula Clark's Let It Be Me, Mark Lanegan's Bombed, Matt Lambert's Cold Diver – gestures toward a last act that takes in breakdancing, lip-syncing to Minnie Ripperton, and fireworks.
Cinematographer Christos Karamanis boxes in the madness with disciplined framing. It is, perhaps entirely the point, that the film’s shenanigans leave one yearning for the same sense of order to be imposed elsewhere.
