Chevalier
Directed by Athina Rachel Tsangari.
Starring Yiorgos Kendros, Panos Koronis, Efthymis Papadimitriou, Giorgos Pyrpassopoulos, Sakis Rouvas and Vangelis Mourikis. In Greek with subtitles.105 mins
For the best part of three decades, Greek cinema was represented internationally by the impossibly high brow of Theo Angelopoulis. His majestic, long, slow moving, (or boring), meticulously composed epics would be ushered past the queue into the Cannes film festival, receive four to five star reviews in the proper papers and mesmerise rows of largely empty seats in up market, subterranean cinemas across London for a week or two. He's gone now and so has most of the financing that supported his visions; now the profile of Greek art house cinema is drawn by the sarky slithers of surreal discontent made by Yorgos (Dogtooth, Lobster) Lanthimos, films so cranky and scathing they wouldn't dream of sharing with you what was bugging them.
In Chevalier, six successful men on a luxury boat trip in the Aegean, end up in the ultimate contest to see who is the best of them. Like a giant time and motion study they measure every aspect of their performance and judge who is the best. It is the work of Lanthimos's associate producer and though superficially her film shares the detached, opaque manner of his films, there's no great mystery it. It's a basic allegory about how testosterone driven, masculine insecurities ruin society, so much so that they are driven to inflict on themselves the same intensely critical scrutiny they have previously directed towards women to keep them down. This is all perfectly valid and the film, which won the not very prestigious top prize at last year's London Film Festival, though slickly made and relatively droll ultimately seems a little too please with its unremarkable revelations – it's basically the same as a female comedy doing her “men, eh,” routine. One woman in the auditorium was laughing uproariously throughout while most of the men were more muted, and a little impatient – possibly because there was football on at the same time.
Directed by Athina Rachel Tsangari.
Starring Yiorgos Kendros, Panos Koronis, Efthymis Papadimitriou, Giorgos Pyrpassopoulos, Sakis Rouvas and Vangelis Mourikis. In Greek with subtitles.105 mins
For the best part of three decades, Greek cinema was represented internationally by the impossibly high brow of Theo Angelopoulis. His majestic, long, slow moving, (or boring), meticulously composed epics would be ushered past the queue into the Cannes film festival, receive four to five star reviews in the proper papers and mesmerise rows of largely empty seats in up market, subterranean cinemas across London for a week or two. He's gone now and so has most of the financing that supported his visions; now the profile of Greek art house cinema is drawn by the sarky slithers of surreal discontent made by Yorgos (Dogtooth, Lobster) Lanthimos, films so cranky and scathing they wouldn't dream of sharing with you what was bugging them.
In Chevalier, six successful men on a luxury boat trip in the Aegean, end up in the ultimate contest to see who is the best of them. Like a giant time and motion study they measure every aspect of their performance and judge who is the best. It is the work of Lanthimos's associate producer and though superficially her film shares the detached, opaque manner of his films, there's no great mystery it. It's a basic allegory about how testosterone driven, masculine insecurities ruin society, so much so that they are driven to inflict on themselves the same intensely critical scrutiny they have previously directed towards women to keep them down. This is all perfectly valid and the film, which won the not very prestigious top prize at last year's London Film Festival, though slickly made and relatively droll ultimately seems a little too please with its unremarkable revelations – it's basically the same as a female comedy doing her “men, eh,” routine. One woman in the auditorium was laughing uproariously throughout while most of the men were more muted, and a little impatient – possibly because there was football on at the same time.
