Review by
Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Stelios Kammitsis
Starring: Vasilis Magouliotis, Anton Weil, Stella
Fryogeni
It’s a tale as old as modern cinema: disenfranchised and lonely male goes
on a journey of self-discovery and along the way meets someone who turns
his tiny world upside down, invigorating him towards self-actualisation
and a reassuringly happy ending. Cameron Crowe is the auteur of this sort
of fare, with the heteronormative tediums of
Almost Famous or Elizabethtown typifying this
sort of feckless bloke meets hot yet scatty woman who emboldens all of his
qualities, a vampiric dynamic which has somehow been reframed as both
romantic and comedic.
However, the implied misogyny of the manic pixie dream girl narrative is
somewhat challenged in Stelios Kammitsis’ feature length debut
The Man with the Answers, as here the leads are both male, sidestepping the gender archetypes
which characterise the base genre. Could
The Man with the Answers’ subversion extend further than swapping out sexualities?
Our hapless protagonist is pretty Greek lad Victoras (Vasilis Magouliotis). Victoras’ professional high diving career is now over, and he ekes out
his days working in a low paying job in between visiting his hospitalised
grandmother. You know that Nana Victoras’ battery has been hovering at 1%
for some time now, as on the communal ward where she is situated the strip
lighting flickers ominously. Subtle it ain’t, but this prologue does at
least communicate recognisable feeling and generate sympathy for Victoras,
however ersatz the emotion may be.
And that’s not all that Kammitsis generates in these opening scenes...
Talk about the male gaze! The lascivious manner in which
Thodoros Mihopoulos’ camera is all over Magouliotis makes Micheal
Bay filming Megan Fox seem positively chaste. We see his tanned torso flex
as he gratuitously walks across his apartment, and then he walks across it
on his hands too: all angles catered for and lingered over. We are set up
for some full-on homoerotic escapism.
Bored of apartment acrobatics, Victoras decides to drive across Europe to
visit his estranged mother. Along the way, he picks up mercurial pogi
dream guy Mathias (Anton Weil); tall, dark and daddy. The weirdly
kleptomaniac Mathias (he steals sandwiches and bags of crisps from garages
along the way - what a free spirit!) picks up Victoras in a different
sense of the word though, flirtatiously teasing and taunting him towards
his full potential.
This goes on for some time; a passive aggressive dynamic which you would
think may, within the glossy fantasy of visual narrative, innately turn
into sex. But it doesn’t! Even though we see a couple of bare arses when
the chaps go off road for a spontaneous swim in a picturesque lake
(encouraged by Mathias, who seems to have memorised Lonely Planet’s
Prettiest Cottaging Sites Across Europe), it takes ages for the inevitable
to happen. In fact, sat there for so long waiting for these two alamos to
shag, I began to actually wonder if I had read the signals all wrong and
this wasn’t a prospective gay daydream, but an especially tasteful looking
buddy movie (which perhaps says more about my cultural conditioning than
the film...).
Don’t fret though, the Poole gaydar never fails. And soon, I was wondering
instead if, in fact, we were subject to a Fight Club (that
homoerotic masterpiece) situation where Mathias is a figment of Victoras’
needy imagination/libido. But perhaps that is projecting an intriguing
element onto this otherwise pretty but pedestrian flick. In Pride month
especially, we’re all for gay cinema which appropriates hegemonic tropes
and narratives, but it’s a shame that
The Man with the Answers is as authentically wet and
predictable as its hetero-orientated forebearers.
The Man with the Answers is on UK
DVD and Peccadillo On Demand from June 28th, with a general VOD release on
July 5th.
