Head On

Wow! What a powerful film! I have seen it twice and am amazed at the grip it holds on the viewer. The cast performs brilliantly. The themes are difficult and honest--our hero (who really is an anti-hero) recognizes his faults but cannot overcome them. No comic book, Hollywood film this! It is brutally honest with all its characters and so rich in acting and Greek music that I must say it ranks as one of the finest films I have seen in the past 10 years. Yes, the ending is sad, tragic, but real. Four stars for this excellent effort.

Culture clash in modern-day Australia, as a 19-year-old Greek named Ari, handsome but feckless--and prone to snorting and shooting drugs--rebels against his hot-tempered papa, a man of values and culture but perhaps stuck in the past. Ari's inner-anger is all-encompassing; he lashes out at his family, at his diverse neighborhood (which appears to be an otherwise peaceful agglomeration of working-class Asians and middle easterners) and at girls who find him attractive. Ari's father is shown as disappointed with his wife and children, but even in the flashbacks there aren't any clues as to what would've made this man happy (he and his wife protested for Greek rights, but does he want his son to continue this fight--and what would the fight be about, the same issues the father fought for?). As Ari, Alex Dimitriades struts and preens like the next John Travolta (in fact, some of the home front squabbles, particularly one around the table, seem lifted from "Saturday Night Fever"). It's a risky role for the actor, who must keep up a perpetually ill-mannered demeanor, complete with lusty, angry homosexual activities which Ari keeps secret (his father hates 'poofters'); yet, Dimitriades, self-enamored and intense, makes the part work for himself and the audience. He's helped a great deal by director Ana Kokkinos, who also co-adapted the screenplay from Christos Tsiolkas's novel "Loaded" with Andrew Bovell and Mira Robertson. Kokkinos keeps the camera busy and free-flowing, although she stumbles when attempting artiness, which in this case is akin to dreariness. Some marvelous moments emerge in what could have been just another coming-of-age melodrama. **1/2 from ****

The kettle is on the boil and 19 year old Ari is about to burst with a combination of his culture, sexuality and drug intake, colliding to create a mixed up youth with a cause. His parents migrated to Melbourne, Australia, from Greece and with them they brought their strong culture that they hang onto while back in Greece the culture changes with the times. This we don't see but it is the fact of life for every second generation immigrant who has to fight the ignorance and hypocrisy of their parents and social surroundings. This creates a monster Ari carries on his back, a destructive energy within him that is wasted in back street alleys, public toilets and where ever he can get it. And when people don't come to his side of life, he manipulates them with sexual advances, testing their moral grounds. Through his love of Greek dancing, Ari yearns to keep part of his ancestral culture intact for identity purposes, but with his own freedom of passion. Can the two mix? That's what he's journey is. A journey for self expression without any rules of repression. This is Alex Dimitriades' cake as he eats Ari up and plays the character with conviction. Director Ana gets right into the heart and soul of Ari, via the camera with a confronting script dealing with issues aimed at any migrating culture.

Disturbing, powerful look at a few days in the life of a gay Greek-Australian man named Ari. He's very handsome, muscular, young (21), lives unhappily at home with his parents, is closeted, addicted to drugs and prefers anonymous, degrading sex. He can't find a job or any escape. Then he meets hunky, attractive Shawn who loves him. Will this change his life? The answer may surprise you.

This is NOT a feel-good gay film. It's bleak and depressing but just great. Alex Dimitriades is very good in a difficult role--the sex scenes are degrading and brutal and there's a humiliating interrogation scene by the police. Dimitriades deserves credit for appearing nude (a great body, by the way) and showing frankly how much Ari hates himself and feels he deserves all the pain he's taking. Obviously this is not for everyone but I find it an incredible portrait of a thoroughly destroyed man.

I've just come back from the cinema, and having read the book ('Loaded' by Christos Tsiolkas) and being British/Greek and gay I thought it was excellent. It is a rarity for a start: a very good adaptation of a book, with amazing performances from an all-Greek Australian cast, including the gorgeous Alex Dimitriades himself who, incidentally is straight. I was particularly impressed about the cinematography (I looked it up later - by Jaems Grant and no, it's not a spelling mistake), all moody and dark like the plot.

The whole point about the film is encapsulated in the scene where Ari is having oral sex with Sean. He was selfishly roughing up and gagging Sean who had just said that he loved him. It was the ultimate brutalisation of sex by a brutalised closeted youngster in a hopeless, brutalising society. At that moment we wince, as Ari consciously rejects love for the anonymity of the street corner suck-off, but we *do* understand why he is unable to form a relationship: in his own way, he acts according to type, obeying his family's and society's homophobic and racist insults and conventions. Symbolically he looks up from his knees in the end, just as his TV friend Toula pushed him a few scenes before dismissively. The moral of the film as she says is that if you don't stand up for yourself you spend your life on your knees.

That moral may perhaps be irrelevant or far gone for gays who have come out and have asserted themselves in society by rejecting the hypocrisy of a double life full of compromises, but it is nevertheless still relevant for a large number of people in many different cultures.