Genres blend and genders bend in ‘Broadway’
To read Greek writer/director Christos Massalas’s comments in the “official” notes included within the press material for his debut feature film – “Broadway,” which opened a limited theatrical run on April 26 and drops on DVD and VOD platforms May 16 – is to wonder what kind of abstract, experimental, hallucinatory vision he must have been following as he crafted it.
Describing the gestation process for his movie as he experienced it within his own mind, Massalas says that “The colors were saturated, and the feelings were sometimes red, sometimes blue, and sometimes they smelled of gasoline.
There were dancers, there were thieves, and Athens was a sunlit stage where monuments of the 20th century stood glorious and rusty.” All that sounds very raw and haphazard, and perhaps more than a little pretentious, like a fledgling author’s ambitious-but-unfocused vision for the “Great American Novel” (or, in this case, the “Great Greek Novel”) they are passionately planning to write.
Yet incredibly, it’s a description that captures to perfection the essence of the film he crafted from that vision, and perhaps even conveys more useful information about it than any plot synopsis might ever be able to do.
