Until recently, Christos Massalas was a solar presence on the short film festival circuit; if I remember well, his Flowers and Bottoms was a true epiphany for me, in my early college days. Years later, meaning nowadays, his debut feature, Broadway, is screening in one of the competitions at Rotterdam.

Massalas enjoys destabilizing words. The film’s title is deceptive – Broadway isn’t Broadway, but rather, it’s a decrepit cultural edifice that lies around the corner, at the edges of Athens, which probably was dealt its death blow during the crisis of the aughts. Secretly, this is where a band apart of hoodlums has made their nest, who are later joined by the improbable Nelly (Elsa Lekakou), a young runaway who seems to have escaped the clutches of her mother – a ballerina that’s gotten involved with a local kingpin. And since she’s her mother’s daughter, she decides to become a nightclub dancer; and to even execute her numbers while donning a tutu. Cinema has just gained its newest brat in jeopardy.

And a striking directorial sensibility, too. Once she is ingratiated with the squatters, Nelly helps her newfound comrades in committing petty thefts, the way she knows best: by dancing, not nocturnally, but provocatively, in a somewhat carnivalesque way. While all the passerby’s eyes are on her, their pockets are being picked. Theft as a compliment to dancing – a spectacle; one of many.

The fact that their hideout is this former edifice, their bedrooms are former auditoriums, and their backyard’s an open-air cinema, is a testament to much of the sensibility that I was praising earlier on. Greece, the lance of history, is amongst those countries that have faced the archeology of the instant all across the crisis of the 2000s; Massala was capable of hearing how modern ruins, which had just been at the peak of their youths, were wailing at the fall of the empire; ours. Such a ruin is incapable of becoming a home, but it can turn into a decadent palace. And what better people to inhabit it than a handful of eccentric losers and their pet monkey, Lola? Two homosexuals, the promiscuous savior – and lover – of Nelly, a caretaker, and an old patriarch; the film doesn’t shy away from getting into trouble. As it doesn’t shy away from acts of tenderness. Shortly, each of them will enjoy the caressing hand of the script, bringing the old cinematic tradition of sympathizing with the world’s insubordinates to fruition. Cinema has just gained its newest odd family.

One whose life is bitterly funny; that gets rich on little and gets poorer by the minute. All of its members are feeding on precarity. As they set foot in stores, they relish in the same stupid indulgences that validate our days, too – water, but some juice too, take-out food, but also a pineapple; condoms, but flavored. They eat canned meat and listen to the radio; „KISS FM is sending you to Europe to meet your favorite superstars!”; then „this song is dedicated to all the lonely cowboys of this town”. Nelly met her fair share of cowboys across the years; that is if we are to take cowboys as those kinds of individuals that can only affirm themselves by saving others. In one of her many voice-over interventions, she says that someone always ends up saving her and that she now wishes to also become a savior; a cowboy girl.

However, her new buddies are hiding some dark things. Amongst them, a man who was heavily beaten, secretly lying unconscious – Jonas „The Lithuanian” (a truly funny reference to Jonas Mekas), as he is hiding, and being hidden, from a capo di tutti capi which he had once served. What must be done is to disguise him, to cross-dress him; once he’s back on his feet, in a Buñuelian epiphany, Jonas becomes Barbara. And not in a crass and giggling fashion suited to random camouflages in random films; this is a true, profound becoming, that is foggy even to the protagonist who once more turns into a lover. Pronouns are some such unstable words.

The two are followed from different angles; police, kingpins, families; Nelly’s lover ends up in jail; his form impeccable, Massalas seems to have crafted a thriller. In fact, he has only done a thriller, since the film’s mastery is roundabout, circumventing the rules of the game. Although it has its share of hesitancy when it comes to the genre’s proverbial pedantry – anticipatory music, suspense, obvious clues -, the script’s strings are not so highly tuned as to be in danger of snapping. The saboteur? None other than the director himself, through another one of his sensibility’s qualities; something queer and histrionic, with a predisposition towards stridency.

Something juicy. These individuals are indeed bandits, but their true fraud is the dance. That’s something one cannot miss. Rudolph and Mojito (the gay couple) are the co-owners of a stutter and a playful spirit that are often bestowed onto on-screen homosexuality. And Massalas understood the hidden capacity of mainstream cinema of enacting good; since we often forget – goodness must not always come in impressive quantities. What a relief: abducted by her stepfather’s henchmen, Nelly is saved by the trans network of Athens, a horde of flamboyant women who descend upon the brutes that snatched the girl. This is how Massalas misses his chance at genre cinema only to take another route, one that is freer, that cannot be surmised with any suffixes.

Given that one of the film’s co-producers is Digital Cube, there is a given chance that it might make its way onto Romanian cinema screens. That is what I wish for (myself).

Călin Boto

Film critic and journalist. He is an editor at AARC and writes the ”Screens” features for Art Magazine. He collaborates with many publications and film festivals as a freelancer and he is strangely attached to John Ford's movies.