"You can make a horror movie; you can make an action movie; you can make a bromance," says director Athina Rachel Tsangari. "All of these films, to a certain extent, will be about power." Even nature documentaries, she adds. Strike that: especially nature documentaries. "They're always a very inspiring research for me," she says. "Because are all programmed to be predators, men and women alike."
Athina Rachel Tsangari is one of the leading lights in the so-called "Greek weird wave" – a label she dismisses, but which certainly means something to anyone who saw her surreal vision of small town Greece Attenberg (2009) or the films she has produced with Yorgos Lanthimos, Dogtooth and Alps. In Chevalier, her latest film, she assembles six men on a luxury weekend fishing trip who, when they are not trying to spear fish, are jostling for supremacy with each other. Are they predators? They certainly aspire to be red in tooth and claw.
![<i>Chevalier</i> director Athina Rachel Tsangari.](/web/20161007184705im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/r/t/o/g/9/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.grtk1i.png/1475660220046.jpg)
In that spirit, they decide to play an invented game called Chevalier where they give each other points to see who is "the best" among them. Not just the best at fishing, but who sleeps in the neatest position or who has the most dramatically satisfying phone call home to a loved one. When they get back to port, they lie to these loved ones that they have been waylaid by a storm so that they can keep playing. "That was always a very important point, that they don't really want to go back to their lives," says Tsangari. "It's torture: they are not really having a great time, but they are actually happier playing the game than doing anything else."
Tsangari is fascinated by games. "I am interested in fictional structures we create, either as a strategy or as an escape. Basically a game is creating a fiction for ourselves, so this is a fiction within a fiction." She and her co-writer Efthymis Filippou decided that the most important feature of Chevalier was that it would have no rules: the men rate each other at random and entirely subjectively. "But I feel we play Chevalier every day, without actually calling it that," she says. "It's all about judging each other based on every single thing that we do." The game is endless, so who wins doesn't matter.
![<i>Chevalier</i> screens at ACMI and as part of the 2016 Greek Film Festival.](/web/20161007184705im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/r/t/k/2/h/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.grtk1i.png/1475660220046.jpg)
Critics have read the film as an analysis of masculinity, but Tsangari says she doesn't think of it in gender terms. She had previously made a short film called The Capsule in which girls at a grim boarding school offered up competing confessions to their headmistress – a working vampire – to see who would be considered strong enough to succeed her. "It was an amazing experience," Tsangari remembers, "so I thought it would be interesting to do this with a group of just men." Not because she thought men would behave differently from women. "I tend not to divide genders this way. I just thought it would be clearer, in terms of the contest for domination, without a member of another gender to confuse the struggle between them."
The struggle is painful, but it is always funny. "I like that balance in drama. One of my biggest influences is Samuel Beckett. I never want something like a story to be very heavy or pompous and I like these little absurd moments that we have in our day. But I don't really call it absurdism, because it makes total sense to me. It's just a different kind of outlook on the world."
Tsangari is 50. She was studying theatre performance at New York University when she met director Richard Linklater on a visit to Austin, Texas, when he was making Slacker (1991), his first feature. "I just really admired the whole process of making a film with your friends – non-actors, basically – and taking real life as your material." At that point, she says, she was seduced away from theatre to cinema. "But in a way it's not different, because the way I set up my films is very much like a theatre process. I like to rehearse a lot and so far all my films have been in very controlled space, in a way using space as a proscenium."
Rehearsals for Chevalier lasted two months and took place on the boat while it was in port. They headed out to sea when they started shooting. Sometimes they had to break for a couple of hours because the actors were all seasick. "So it was quite strenuous, but they are all incredible actors and they were all completely committed." People assume it must have been tough for her to direct a boatful of men. "But I didn't feel any so-called sexism," she says. "Actually, we had a lot of fun. It was like a kindergarten in there every day."
![Panos Koronis, Athina Rachel Tsangari and Giorgos Pyrpassopoulos after <i>Chevalier</i> was named best film at the 2015 ...](/web/20161007184705im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/r/t/k/l/4/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.grtk1i.png/1475660220046.jpg)
Chevalier screens at ACMI Melbourne from October 6; at Sydney's Palace Norton Street on October 13 & 21; and at Palace Nova Eastend in Adelaide on October 15 as part of the Greek Film Festival.