Leave it to a woman to lay bare the foibles of man. A film set aboard a luxury yacht with a cast of male actors engaged in bouts of masculine idiocy sounds like the exact kind of excuse Adam Sandler would use to take his entourage of has-beens on a studio-funded vacation. They might get into wacky dilemmas, react to that wackiness with bodily emissions, either liquid or gaseous, meanwhile taking more than a few jabs, literal or figurative, at each other’s nethers—and this happens too in Chevalier, the third feature film by Greek filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari. But Tsangari tells dick jokes of a higher caliber and with a higher purpose: Her dick jokes are essential to her satire of manliness.
Chevalier begins on a boat and remains there. It’s a lavish vessel owned by a man known only as the Doctor (Yiorgos Kendros), who has invited five friends and acquaintances—his assistant, Christos (Sakis Rouvas), his son-in-law Yannis (Yorgos Pirpassopoulos), Yannis’s hirsute manchild brother Dimitris (Makis Papadimitriou), and business partners Josef (Vangelis Mourikis) and Yorgos (Panos Koronis)—for a fishing jaunt on the Aegean Sea. The goal is leisure, of course, with their days spent idling around on the water and in it, making aqua-donuts with jet skis or pulling bream from the depths. Dedicated relaxation isn’t enough to keep them occupied, though, and so Christos proposes a game: Each man thinks up a mental or physical contest where everyone participates and then scores the other. Whoever winds up with the most points wins.
You can make educated guesses about where the film goes from there if you’re fluent in the language of competitive macho bluster, but Tsangari is a gifted, empathetic filmmaker, and she takes Chevalier, her characters and her audience to both expected and surprising places. She is not interested in making a document solely to mock stubborn male foolishness, though there is plenty of that: Watch closely in Chevalier’s opening scenes and you’ll note that these guys challenge each other even before Christos offers his plot-defining suggestion to the rest of his compatriots. Dudes don’t need a reason to butt heads and demonstrate their virility, the film appears to say; leave them alone for long enough and they’ll turn anything into sport. They make casual chatter about how far they’re able to dive, whether they used tanks, how many fish they caught. You’re just waiting for someone to drop trou and pull out a ruler.
The wait ends less than an hour in. Spoilers, perhaps, but you can’t make a movie about men taking part in escalating ego clashes without spotlighting their penises. Chevalier takes us from figurative to literal cock-measuring with a deliberate sense of pacing, perhaps because Tsangari realizes that too much too soon would spoil the joke by ducking reality. Men prefer to show off the size of their privates without having to expose themselves: He who is, as Josef or Yorgos might say, “best in general” has the biggest metaphorical pecker, which is nearly as good as having the biggest actual pecker. (Men are taught to gauge manhood on factors they have zero control over. We’re stupid that way.)