Andrew Haigh’s debut feature Greek Pete, a biographical “year in the life” of a London rentboy, takes the documentary and gives it a good pounding.
Pete is an early-20s dark-haired, nice-looking guy who loves to talk. We first meet him as if we’re eavesdropping, from a distance, through a doorway. He’s on a sofa with a client chatting. The client’s face is fuzzed out. The two men pull relaxed poses as they make small talk about Pete’s background. Then Haigh’s camera cuts to “later that night”, now less the eavesdropper and more the Peeping Tom, as Pete gives the client a severe anal rogering. Cuts again to a neon-speckled club where Pete is dancing with his mates. Cuts again to a loosey-goosey chat between Pete and fellow rent boys about how they all got into the game – some as young as 13 – with Pete delivering a line we’re going to hear a few more times before the end credits roll, his philosophy. “I just want to make as much money as possible.”
Pete lives together with his boyfriend Kai in Covent Garden, central London. He’s reasoned that he needs a central location to pull in the high rollers. His place costs money but he reckons it’s worth it. Kai, also on the game, has ambitions far less lofty than Pete.
Throughout, Pete uses the term “escort” rather than “rent boy”. Haigh doesn’t ask him why. He appears not to intervene at all as Pete and his fellow sex-worker friends – youngandcutelad, hugecockfromthenorth and… er… Barbara Bush among them – talk candidly, sometimes nervously but usually not, on camera about lives entirely alien from the point of view of most people watching.
Haigh’s main intervention comes later, when he assembles his interviews, slowing his camera down here and there, injecting wafty music, interposing images from Pete’s youth growing up in a loving extended Greek family and collaging together scenes from current everyday life – the guys tenderly celebrating Christmas together, for example. Sure, they talk about sex more than most people but in the edit suite Haigh selects moments and images that also suggest a certain poignancy.
The film functions both as an excellent introduction to the world of the gay escort and as a reminder that, hey, they’re just like us really. Beneath Pete’s swagger and his cocky boasts to potential clients about the size of his endowment, he is a careerist and a professional who wants to do a good job and be recognised as such. Pete yearns to go to LA, where the International Escort Awards are held to celebrate high achievers in the escort industry.
There is sex, the rough sort between Pete and a paying customer and the tender sort between Pete and Kai, but not much more than you might find in a French arthouse movie. There are drugs too, quite a lot of drugs in fact, but Haigh also uses these to the film’s advantage. After Christmas dinner out come the powders – not what Bing had in mind when he sang White Christmas – and the lads all get high. They also get quite confessional. “It’s weird not being with my family at Christmas,” says Pete in a maudlin post-high moment. He also reveals reveals that he was shocked when his mother reacted badly to learning how her son was earning a living. Pete’s dad still doesn’t know, he says (this was made in 2009, so who knows what’s happened in the interim).
Pete is a nice guy. Funny and smart, he’s especially confident in his dealings with his fellow escorts and with clients, slightly less so when he’s talking about his hopes and fears to Haigh’s camera. Greek Pete is something similar, a mix of the grim, the eye-opening, the funny and the emotional. It’s a remarkable film and at only 70 minutes does not overstay its welcome.
It works as a documentary and it mostly is. But Haigh has also constructed a dramatic throughline which finds an echo in Haigh’s next film, his breakthrough. Watching Greek Pete you can see where Weekend came from. And the poignancy he’d later explore in entirely different circumstances in his film 45 Years is here too. In many ways this is Haigh’s career in utero.
Greek Pete – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
