Chevalier (Efthimis Filippou)

Chevalier

Grèce 2015 | Athina Rachel Tsangari | vostEN | 105’ | digital | Cast : Yiorgos Kendros, Panos Koronis, Vangelis Mourikis, Makis Papadimitriou, Yorgos Pirpassopoulos, Sakis Rouvas

► Official Competition, Locarno Film Festival 2015

Six well-to-do men on a sailing vacation devise increasingly extreme competitions to determine, definitively, which of them is “the best in general.” No women are present to interfere. Egos will be bruised, blood will be spilled, manhood will be … measured.

« Filippou and Tsangari’s screenplay never explicitly mentions why the men are out at sea together and it takes a while before each character registers as a separate entity and even then there’s never a sense they might have a life beyond the time they spend together onscreen. But this film is not about individual stories, experiences and relationships so much as the mechanisms and patterns that emerge whenever and wherever people are together. Just like a cubist painting, what happens in the film doesn’t necessarily resemble real life in a narrow documentary sense but instead gives the viewer something else: a chance to consider certain behavior from various sides and on a more abstract level. » (The Hollywood Reporter).

« Chevalier emerges as that fascinating and seemingly paradoxical thing: a feminist film in which women are virtually absent from the screen. » (Sight and Sound)

Org. Cinémathèque