The new film from director Sherry Horman, Männer wie wir (Guys and Balls), proves that one can always find a new twist on a tested formula (even if this does not automatically mean it will be an enjoyable take on a genre film). In the case of Männer wie wir, the typical sports films has the added twist of having a gay protagonist who leads a team of exclusively gay men. The big game to be won pitches the worldly gay men against the aggressively homophobe straight team from the rural village where our protagonist grew up. No points for guessing who wins. 

 

Our protagonist is a baker’s son called Ecki (Maximilian Brückner) who played football with the locals until he was thrown of the team when his teammates accidentally discover his sexuality. Ecki wants to prove his ex buddies that gay men do indeed play football and challenges his old team to play a match against him and a team made up of gay men. Unfortunately for Ecki, there is not a parallel section of the Bundesliga for gay players where he could just go and ask ten others to come and play with him. Our gay hero has to go to the big city where his sister works as a nurse, in the hope he will find ten able gay men there.   

 

His recruits include men from all shades of the gay spectrum; leather bears, transvestites, gay fathers, immigrant drama queens and even Brazilian star players. Being a comedy, much of these stereotypes are played for laughs, which in this case means cheap and rather easy laughs most of the time.  It certainly does not help the characters to acquire a personality of their own. The only person whom we do get to know besides Ecki is Sven (David Rott), a male nurse who works with Ecki’s sister. He is the only man on the team whose personality is not described by a gay stereotype and thus he is the perfect material for the role of Ecki’s love interest. The fact that he is pleasant to look at does not hurt either.   

 

The actors (many of whom apparently are straight) seem to be a bit lost in the wealth of stereotypes and attempts at humour in the we-are-so-accepting vein; Benedikt Gollhardt’s script often confuses acceptance of different lifestyles with indifference towards how other people live. A supposedly emotional scene between a gay father (Christian Berkel) and his little son rings false because Berkel’s character is not treated with the same respect in the rest of the film, in which he is just a third of a menage-à-trois of leather-clad bike riders. This trivialises both his character and the general message of acceptance that the film wants to carry out. 

 

Technically, the film looks cured, with the cinematography of Hanno Lentz especially noteworthy during the Big Game finale in which large overhead and crane shots and digital colour saturation offer us a pleasantly refreshing way of looking at a football game. Brückner as Ecki knows how to generate our sympathy but his character is bogged down by a script that relies too much on stereotypes for its humour on both the gay- and the small rural village sides. The sexuality of its characters is just an added plot twist in this mildly funny sports comedy that never seems to accept its own characters as people first and beings defined by their sexuality second.

 

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