Chevalier

Chevalier might well be Homer’s lost epic about Odysseus and his men, playfully captioned “Even Odder a’Sea.” Or maybe the film is just a parable about modern-day men behaving badly. Or perhaps it’s even an allegory about the state of modern-day Greece. One thing’s for certain, however: Director and co-writer Athina Rachel Tsangari wants viewers to fill in the blanks.

Here’s what I do know: Six men are aboard a luxury yacht for a spear-fishing vacation in the Aegean. Soon their mundane competition over who caught the largest fish devolves into a metaphorical pissing contest over which of them is the “best in everything.” It’s a game with arbitrary rules in which each man both judges and competes. Who has the best ringtone, best erection, and best cholesterol level? Other competitions are timed events, such as cleaning chores on the vessel and putting together Ikea-like bookshelves. Each man keeps score in his head or little notebooks, and each one judges the others on standards of his own choosing (does one wear his pants too high, does another snore too loudly, are someone’s thighs too fat?). Meanwhile the three staff members on the yacht, who are little more than glorified servants, keep their own scores and function as a literal Greek chorus. The striking imagery of the men filmed against the glistening sea or within their tight personal cabins hints at a homoeroticism that never becomes more than glancing, and certainly never anything remotely like a Deliverance voyage. Though it’s to Tsangari’s credit that these intimations remain undramatized, there is also a sense of undeveloped storylines and unfulfilled expectations. Again, we are back to the viewers needing to complete the personality profiles of the six men and their backgrounds on their own steam – as well as figuring out what it all means.

Yet, maybe it means nothing and is just a comedy about men without mooring. Tsangari, a former Austin resident and instructor at UT, comes by this heritage rightly. In addition to working on several of Richard Linklater’s films, co-producing and acting in Before Midnight (filmed in Greece), she was the associate producer on Yorgos Lanthimos’ multi-award-winning Dogtooth. In turn, Lanthimos produced Tsangari’s female-centric movie Attenberg in 2010, and Efthymis Filippou, co-writer of Lanthimos’ current arthouse oddity The Lobster, was also Tsangari’s co-writer on Chevalier. This filmmaking clique is responsible for some of the more original and entertaining films released today. Just don’t ask me what any of them mean. They’re all Greek to me.

(Athina Rachel Tsangari will participate in a Skype Q&A following the Wednesday evening screening.)