Chevalier

Six men cruise the Aegean aboard a luxury yacht variously fishing, scuba diving and vying for superiority in a series of increasingly bizarre competitive games. These include the innocuously mad against-the-clock assembly of IKEA shelves, the whole orchestrated with a quiet relish by the boat’s owner, an imperious 60-something known only as The Doctor (Yiorgos Kendros).

At one end of the social spectrum is alpha male Yannis (Yorgos Pirpassopoulos), at the other his brother, the bumbling, insecure mummy’s boy Dimitris (Makis Papadimitriou). Much of the film’s tinder-dry humour comes from their awkward relationship. Director/co-writer Athina Rachel Tsangari produced both Dogtooth and Alps, and Chevalier is infused with the droll influence of those films’ director, Yorgos Lanthimos. Winner of Best Film at the London Film Festival 2015.

Chevalier, dir. Athina Rachel Tsangari, Greece 2015, 105 mins. Greek with English subtitles.