Kyriakos Chatzimichailidis | Οι άντρες δεν κλαίνε (Men Don’t Cry) / 2001

the accusing ghost of a sexual past

by Douglas Messerli

 

Giannis Tsiros (screenplay), Kyriakos Chatzimichailidis (director) Οι άντρες δεν κλαίνε (Men Don’t Cry) / 2001 [18 minutes]

 

On a rainy winter night, a soaking wet man, Ilias (Themis Panou), rings the bell of Petros’ (Petros Lagoutis) home. He quite literally pushes his way into the house and collapses onto the couch, heavily coughing. Petros, startled but nonetheless vaguely attracted and simultaneously frightened makes tea, as the other roams the place, evaluating the man he has come to visit through the objects cluttering his home, including a large golden sculptured dildo and a plastic tree that holds the pictures of many of the gay men with whom the somewhat rotund Petros has had sex.

     Ilias is disappointed that Petros does not remember him, but recognizes that his body has changed in the years since they met at a gay bar. And slowly throughout the film, in black-and-white, blurred glimpses, we do see Petros piecing together their long-ago encounter.

     Understandably, Petros is finally angered by the night-time intrusion and begs the intruder to leave, offering him money. But Ilias does not want money, he wants shelter, and suggests that Petros take him in, arguing that we won’t be a bother, will sleep on the couch, and even do the dishes. One almost wonders if he isn’t asking for a long-term relationship that was denied him that long-ago night.

     When Petros offers him even more money to leave him alone, Ilias gradually reveals his real intentions for the visit. The entire “attack” and scree is based on the fact that in Ilias’ mind on that long night ago Petros infected him with AIDS, from which he now suffers.

     He argues that he knows it was Petros because he himself is straight. He and his friends used to visit the gay bars simply to mock and frighten the gay men, but that night….he had his first and last homosexual encounter.

      As the title hints, Petros does indeed break down in tears with the revelation, by film’s end almost becoming Ilias’ patient, asking what it feels like to be so sick, the answer being quite self-evident as he serves up a meal to his host.

      In the end I find this work quite disturbing in its assumptions and argument. Although we might easily accuse Petros of having sex without warning his partners of his illness, it appears he has not been tested and has no idea that he is infected. And I might add that we have only the word of a brute abuser, who admittedly and somewhat proudly restates his past behavior. Moreover, if it has been several years since their encounter, why has Ilias still not had any symptoms? That might indeed be possible, but somewhat unlikely. In fact, this film seems almost homophobic to me, centering on a heterosexual who enters a gay man’s house to blame him for his sexual activity as if his own intentions and involvement had no significance. The rant of a straight man for infecting him with AIDS sounds far too similar to the attacks on gays during the worst days of the epidemic, people having not quite yet recognized that, in fact, AIDS was not a gay disease, but a sexually-transmitted plague which can afflict all those who have unprotected sexual contact. Unless Ilias is a heterosexual virgin with Petros being his only sexual partner ever, it is just as likely that Ilias would have been infected through one of his female friends or through the needles of the drugs we see him injecting in Petros’ bathroom.

      Perhaps these are the very issues that writer Giannis Tsiros and Greek director Kyriakos Chatzimichailidis were attempting to bring up in their naturalistic, purposely crudely-filmed documentary-like work. But unfortunately, Petros is not intelligent enough to bring up any of these possibilities or to basically challenge the assumptions that the film puts forward through Ilias’ voice. In the end Petros appears simply as a whimpering, chastised child, rightly punished by the beautiful dying man for the excesses of his past life.

     And without any moral pointers, I find this quite unpleasant film to be an expression of the heterosexual phobias of the day instead of an insightful exploration it might have been of a one-time sexual encounter that deserves further probing and explanation.

 

Los Angeles, April 17, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).