Stelios Kammitsis | Ο άνθρωπος με τις απαντήσεις (The Man with the Answers) / 2021

a fairytale

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stelios Kammitsis (screenwriter and director) Ο Άνθρωπος με τις Απαντήσεις (The Man with the Answers) / 2021

 

This co-production of Greece, Cyprus, and Germany from 2021, can perhaps best be described, as other critics already have, as an “unpretentious,” charming, on-the-road film with a gay twist. Yet to me, with its challenge of more than “20 Questions,” its menacing Greek mother who has left her son to run off with a Bavarian German to bear a more beloved blonde-haired boy, and the magical hitchhiker who offers the poor Greek orphan love and almost all the necessary answers seems far more like a kind of Grimm Brothers fairy tale in the tradition of Rumpelstiltskin combined with elements of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid.

    The glum and pouting pretty Greek boy, Victoras (Vasilis Magouliotis), having just buried his beloved grandmother, who obviously became a kind of mother to him when his own mother, Angeliki (Stella Fyrogeni) decamped, decides to visit the monstrous momma in Bavaria, having made no specific plans. He simply takes the ferry to Italy preparing to drive to his mother’s Bavarian estate without even a clue how to get there, pulling out unwieldy maps before he sets off.

    Fortune, however, has kept an eye on him in the manifestation of a young German traveler, a truly free-spirited sensualist, Mathias (Anton Weil) who picks out the unfriendly Greek from all the other travelers, offering him guidance to a gloriously beautiful trip far away from the boredom of the Auto Bahn, which itself becomes a kind of magical evocation, a fairyland of mountain lakes, forests, and even a truly astounding night at Italian wedding party, with the fairies becoming the two boys themselves, who finally discover their bodies physically entwined in a bed in a German inn.

    Along the way, Mathias successfully plays “20 Questions” in an attempt to pump information from the intensely private Victoras, whom he discovers is actually a champion diver who as a child always wanted to fly, Icarus-like, into the sun; is a wonderful dancer whose beauty sweeps a young woman off her feet, and despite his almost blind allegiance to all laws—Matthias occasional petty thievery of overpriced sandwiches and chips along the way truly angers the orderly and law-abiding Greek boy—when he goes wild, goes all the way, suddenly speeding up beyond the limit and, after being stopped by the Italian police, claiming he was drinking (he has had no alcohol), which ends up in his having to surrender his driver’s license and becoming even more dependent on Mathais who now also serves as his chauffeur. Love is followed by a serious fight, and a scene necessary in all such films of the lover’s making up.

     Director Kammitsis is no more forthcoming about his intentions in this languorous movie than is his central character. But the magical, fairytale like experiences and the simple pleasure, as Film Review critic Mansel Stimpson observes, of “the pleasure of looking at length at two appealing actors,” pasted against some of the most beautiful landscape in Europe, may simply be enough to make this film memorable.

     But then Victoras suddenly does arrive with Mathias at the door of witch’s castle, where at the moment all of mother’s attentions have been focused on a birthday party for her younger son, Patrick (Marc Pistono). Angeliki briefly greets her elder boy and his friend and even offers them up a plate of food, but appears to forget to even serve them, ordering up the job to her unfriendly German servant, Helga (Chiara Ore Visca) as she turns her attention again entirely upon her second son. Even Mathias can see why his new lover might be angry over her seeming abandonment.

    The visitors return to their car and begin to drive off as Angeliki attempts to stop them from leaving, a painful encounter which ends with the car crashing into the beloved family pet dog Bjarke. Their escape ends in a visit of the dog, mother, both sons, and Mathias to a pet hospital, as Mathias gently cares for the recovering dog, now with a plastic cone around its neck, and Patrick, while Victoras finally confronts his mother, who explains that she too is often left alone when her husband endlessly travels, suggesting that he may not be the sterling husband she has presented him as. She may be financially better off in Bavaria, but not necessarily emotionally satisfied.

 

   Besides now Victoras has to admit that he has actually repeated his mother’s actions, falling in love with a German “knight” with all the answers with whom he gloriously moves on in a voyage into the future.

 

Los Angeles, March 28, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2026).