Review: 'Broadway' Explores Crime, Community, Gender Identity

Writer-director Christos Massalas centers this Greek drama about crime, art, community, love, and identity around a tough young woman without options and the life she finds among a band of outcasts and street performers living in a dilapidated cinema.

Nelly (Elsa Lekakou) is an exotic dancer skating between legitimacy and the sketchier regions of the city's underbelly when she finds a protector in Markos (Stathis Apostolou), a charismatic – but dangerous – master pickpocket. Like a more nuanced Bill Sykes, Markos takes the waif in, teaches her the art of distracting a crowd with a song and dance, and then shows her how to reap the profits and evade the cops.

The group includes a gay couple – Mohammad (Salim Talbi) and Rudolph (Rafael Papad), who serve as comic relief – as well as a monkey, and maintains connections to even more dangerous types like a burly fellow called The Locksmith (Christos Politis). But Nelly isn't the only newcomer Markos has brought under his wing: A badly beaten man lies in one of the decrepit building's rooms, his face swaddled in bandages. He's an associate of a local crime lord known as Maraboo, who's so paranoid and ruthless that simply having seen his face is cause for getting killed.

To protect the fugitive, Markos decides the newcomer should now live as a woman. Nelly christens her Barbara (Foivos Papadopoulos), and, fascinated with the act of creating a new person from the wreckage of an old life, Nelly falls in love with her – an emotional tie that sparks jealousy in Markos, lighting a fuse that's destined to explode months later.

By then, the gang is known to the cops, but the cops (and various criminal elements, too) are interested in bigger fish – namely, the aforementioned Maraboo, whose goons are still on the hunt to find and kill Barbara. Markos, a shrewd operator, knows there's profit to be made in getting rid of his rival, but only if he proceeds with great caution... while Nelly, who will do anything for Barbara, is ready to throw caution to the wind.

Comparing this modern Greek movie to the ancient Greek tragedies of old would be too facile, and not entirely apt, but even so there's a sense of destiny in this film that proceeds from the contradictory and deeply flawed natures of its artfully drawn characters.

Running even deeper are subtextual questions about sexual and gender identity. Barbara takes to her life as a woman with great ease, even as she falls madly in love... and lust... with Nelly. How conscious was she, in her former life, of her gender identity? We're not given much insight into Barbara's transformation, which seems like the right choice: Barbara's past is a blank to us, her existence given a prelude as the bandages come off to reveal a handsome bearded face, and then commencing in earnest with Nelly's makeover.

But Nelly, too, is transforming, changed both by her entry into a life of crime and her love – part that of a soul mate, part that of a drag mother – for Barbara. At the same time, the twisted (but genuine) love Markos has for Nelly seems to imbue her, as though through osmosis, with a more brutal and unhesitating sensibility. No act of creation, it would seem, is free from the law of physics that dictates that for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction; when Nelly conjures up Barbara, she re-creates herself... perhaps, like Barbara, in the image of who she was always meant to be.

This gem resonates with generations of LGBTQ+ indie filmmaking and feels like it will mature into something unique, distinct, and necessary.

"Broadway" premieres in theaters April 28 and on VOD May 16.