Seeing My Anger Expressed Is A Wonderful Thing

By Daniel Theophanous

Anger is the fuel for the debaucherously nihilistic 24-hour road movie-of-sorts Head On, where 19-year-old Ari sets himself the task of engaging in as much sex, drugs, booze, violence and any other wickedness as humanly possible against the backdrop of a Greek-Australian suburb of Melbourne. Ari is angry and he wants to escape, forget his burdens, at least for the evening.

Director Anna Kokkinos sets her movie in the city’s scuzzy streets and back-alleys of dingy night clubs where Ari gets into fistfights and hook ups with random burley men. Kokkinos pays homage to other nineties arthouse gems such as French film La Haine and Wong Kar Wai’s Happy Together, it even reminds me of the initial scenes of the first Matrix with its dark and grainy texture. Incorporating a multitude of directorial tropes of the time, such as the use of out-of-focus montages to reflect Ari’s intoxicated state as well as the jittery, fast-paced hand-held camera shots to create edginess and frenzy. And it’s all coupled to a soundtrack of bone-jarring breaks and buzzsaw by second-rate Prodigy dance bands, intercepted by melancholic sounds of the bouzouki. 

Now two decades since its release, it appears to have aged well stylistically and thematically, retrospectively trailblazing in its portrayal of queerness in a conservative migrant community. I interpret Kokkinos’ debut as an expression of her own queerness and Greek-ness and the conflicts between the two, morphing them into a singular guise, that of her handsome protagonist. Disenfranchised, jobless, in the closet, Ari navigates his world aimlessly feeding his unsatiated vices to the chagrin of his parents. A disappointment to his father who violently berates him and a mother forever guilt-tripping him. Relatives and friends urging him to get a job, go to university, get married, get with the program but all he wants to do is get fucked. 

I understood Ari immediately upon my first ever viewing of the film in the early noughties. His angst felt guttural, his behavior is carless; almost childish as he embarks on an all-night bender that feels reactionary. It comes from a place of rebellion, from all-consuming frustration against the immovable forces of tradition and patriarchy that prevail amongst older generations in my own migrant community of British Cypriots. Outdated values still anchored in the 50s, 60s and 70s and imposing their views and expectations on their children and grandchildren. These values bear little relation to the ones held in the present-day in their motherland and are also a refusal to engage with any progress occurring in the country they live in.

As Ari navigates his community of cousins, aunties and uncles, family friends, all people who look like him and he looks up to, it reminds me of my family, my relatives, all the Cypriot spaces. People’s welcoming big brown eyes and generous gestures; still thinking of me as a young boy, wishing to cuddle and feed me. The familiarity, the warmth, the food, the uncomplicatedness was/is comforting; a solace from the emotional coldness and frequent othering of living in a predominantly ‘white’ society. But as I grew older, I started to see the ugly traits of hypocrisy, rampant gossip and homophobia. 

I came out to my family comparatively young. About Ari’s age, to the surprise of no one, not my parents or any relatives once the word got out. I was the campiest of boys and yet bizarrely it was something that once revealed, I felt I was not able to fully discuss with people—including my parents. The lack of communication, or signs of acknowledgement, or even simple questions about my sexuality confused me greatly. Did they hate me? Abhor me? Or did they simply not care? Anything would have been better than silence. And why did it matter to me so much?

I found myself excluded from congregations of men in social gatherings, whether it be conversations, cards games or an invite to their side of the dining table. It’s not that I wanted to join them—it's more the gnawing feeling of exclusion. I imagined them thinking the most basic of things like ‘was I a top or a bottom?’ or on the rare occasion they would meet my partner I imagined them thinking ‘who's the man and who’s the woman?’. 

As straight siblings and cousins got asked about jobs, partners, house, children, I would be overlooked. I assumed they wouldn’t be able to deal with what I had to say, so I eventually gave up and said nothing. When entering these spaces, I now held back. I would interpret a relative's facial expression as a sign of disapproval. I found their inflexibility and ignorance intolerable. At first, like Ari, I was incredibly angry at them and then I was angry at myself for caring so much about what they thought. It created a dichotomy that nestled deep with me for long time; my liberal queer London life versus my Cypriot life. I never saw a way for these two to amalgamate, even though I was openly out. 

It is now as I get older, I find appeasement in the sense that I no longer fear how my life is perceived by my parents, society or by anyone really. As generations born after me and more openly Cypriot queers enter the fray, the residual feeling of being the ‘only gay in the Cypriot village’ is slowly subsiding. And I am beginning to see how the various parts of my identity can coalesce; my liberal queerness with my rich Cypriot heritage. Perhaps a conclusion that Ari would eventually reach. And as much as I would love to say, it’s because things have drastically changed within my community, which they have to some degree, it is more due to the life-long task of me accepting myself on my own terms and nobody else’s.  

Since Head On, there have been several releases that have explored this marriage of identity parts. A young German Iranian Parvis in Faraz Shariat’s No Hard Feeling (2020), enjoys freedoms even the local young Germans would dream of. He is openly gay, outspoken living his life unabashedly with the full support of his parents. Both representations of Parvis and his parents are fresh and provide for a useful alternative of how things can be. Parvis is seen to have a strong sense of self-worth, his queerness and cultural background co-exist effortlessly. The way he is, is because he has support and encouragement by his parents and community. That’s the way it should be.

Daniel Theophanous

Twitter: @danny_theo_

Insta: @dannytheo