Women are so vain, aren't they? They're always being all catty and judgmental and creating dominance hierarchies based on shallow attributes — unlike men, who are known to do exactly the same thing when they get together, but in an echo of the stud-whore dichotomy, don't get judged for it. In Athina Rachel Tsangari's dry comedy Chevalier,six men on a fishing trip on the Aegean Sea enter into a contest to determine who's the best at ... well, everything. This motley crew (not to be confused with the boat's actual crew) includes an older man known simply as the Doctor (Yorgos Kendros), alpha male Yannis (Yorgos Pirpassopoulos) and his pudgily beta brother Dimitris (Makis Papadimitriou), the closest thing to a sympathetic character. The inevitable dick-measuring actually happens early on, and is no more important than the points scored or lost on baldness, sleeping posture, silverware-cleaning skills, blood-sugar levels, thigh and belly pooch, and the appropriateness of holding sparklers while lip-synching to Minnie Riperton's "Lovin' You." All totally manly things, of course, and Chevalier is like if the scar-comparing scene in Jaws kept escalating, even if the stakes are never higher than the male ego. (In other words, very high.) It scores extra points for the line "I will not retract my panda statement!", which is as funny out-of-context as in.
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