The Man with the Answers **** (2021, Vasilis Magouliotis, Anton Weil, Stella Fyrogeni) – Classic Movie Review 12,330

Boy meets boy. Boy takes a desperate chance on boy. Troubles on the road ahead. The tender and funny adventurous romantic gay road trip film The Man with the Answers (2021) stars Vasilis Magouliotis as a washed-up twenty-something Greek ex-diving champion and Anton Weil as a lost and drifting eccentric German student. Both characters are all over the place, but they are made for each other, if they can find the right pieces of the puzzle to put together.

They both need answers, but the German boy Mathias (Anton Weil) is the one who asks the questions of the Greek boy Victoras (Vasilis Magouliotis), playing Twenty Questions actually. That game is supposed just to have yes, no answers, but the German boy wants full answers.

Victoras lives with his grandmother in a seaside town in Greece but she is sick and hospitalized, and he is laid off from his work in a furniture workshop. Then Victoras’s grandmother dies, leaving him lost and distraught, but his estranged mother won’t come from Germany for the funeral and he sets off on a road trip in her dusted-off old Audi via Bari, Italy, to Bavaria, Germany, to find her.

On the ferry to Italy, Victoras looks at a plastic sandwich in the bar and puts it back and just buys water, then watches the German boy steal the same sandwich. Later on deck, the confident, chatty, inquisitive Mathias approaches Victoras and offers him the sandwich, but Mathias won’t take it as he has seen Mathias steal it. He then lies and tells Mathias he hasn’t got a car. Actually he hasn’t got a clue.

Next day finds him at the dock in Bari, Italy, in his car desperately looking at maps to find the way. Mathias approaches Victoras, tells him he had already seen him with the car, and offers to show him the way as he’s done the journey back home to Germany so many times before, but they have to take the scenic route.

Victoras considers that he might be picking up a serial killer, and says addio, but relents at the last minute. The road trip and the love affair are on. But there are troubles on the road ahead as Victor’s uptight personality clashes with that of the free-spirited Matthias. Did I mention that Victoras doesn’t have a driving licence? That kind of puts Mathias in the driving seat.

Smashing though the screenplay is, with excellent dialogue that’s both funny and touching, and good plot development that’s involving, credible and unusual, this could only truly succeed with great casting – and Vasilis Magouliotis and Anton Weil are ideally cast, and give perfect performances. Just perfect. The dynamic’s just right, the chemistry’s there. Mathias seems to be The Man with the Answers, at least for Victoras, but Victoras is really The Man with the Answers and has all the answers inside him, but just needs Mathias to ask the questions. Cute, huh?

The Man with the Answers is beguilingly shot on beautiful locations and it looks lovely, the perfect setting for a perfect love affair. A great advert for Italy and Germany, it makes you want to book a car and a ferry right away, or simply watch the movie all over again. This is that rarest of somethings, it just begs for a sequel.

It is written and directed by Stelios Kammitsis, so a lot of kudos to him. It’s a keeper.

© Derek Winnert 2022 Classic Movie Review 12,330

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