Its characters are the six men holidaying on board, out on a fishing trip the captain and two male cooks are also seen from time to time, the latter two eventually offering an ironic counterpart, or sometimes chorus, to what’s happening on deck level. Tsangari’s Chevalier, however, retains a sobriety and economy that makes it cut deeper than the absurdist lark it might have been.Ĭhevalier takes place almost entirely on a compact but luxurious yacht on the Aegean sea. The two directors’ films have generally born some family resemblance, although Lanthimos arguably capsized into self-parody on last year’s awkward, internationally cast, English-language The Lobster. Tsangari is also known as producer of Yorgos Lanthimos’s films ( Kinetta, Dogtooth, Alps), which have tended to deal with similar themes.
She was the creator of the extravagantly eccentric, rigorously modernist (in a detached, neo-Antonioni-esque way) Attenberg (10), a film about family, social bonds, ritual, and dance-like physical contortions. And here’s another example, in the otherwise somber Greek comedy Chevalier: the magically incongruous moment when a short, fat, balding man perplexes his shipmates by doing a perfect lip-synching routine to Minnie Riperton’s soul coloratura ballad “Loving You,” complete with fireworks display and capped by an insouciant cartwheel.īut you possibly expect a moment of strangeness like this from writer-director Athina Rachel Tsangari. I’m also thinking of the dizzy, fizzy disco number that accompanies the communal exercise routine in a park at the end of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Syndromes and a Century, which sends you out grinning even if you’ve previously been scowling with perplexity. Toni Erdmann, admittedly, is anything but a bleak, demanding art film, but the example demonstrates how all cinema, not just the mainstream variety that depends on gratifying our sentiment, can benefit from a little straight-down-the-line emotional release from time to time. The topic comes to mind partly because of this year’s transcendent moment of joy in Cannes, the scene in Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann in which an uptight young corporate woman is persuaded by her father to sing Whitney Houston’s “The Greatest Love of All” at a party and ends up pouring her entire soul into it. This week’s suggested subject for further study: unlikely feel-good moments in art cinema.
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