Deserter offers an insightful picture of male relations in rural Greek society, and a rare treatment of the subject of homosexuality. It is told from the point of view of a young homosexual man, Christos, who accompanies his friend and lover Manolis, a deserter from the army, to Manolis's home town. In this seaside village given over to the spa trade, Christos is accepted as a friendly outsider by everyone but Manolis, who gradually becomes assimilated into the social environment of brutal, destructive machismo and rejects his friend completely. The matrix of family and community relations that makes homosexual love taboo, even for the homosexual, is delicately and complexly inscribed here. At its center is Manolis's mother, who knows and does not know at the same time. Filming with poetic immediacy and authenticity, directors Korras and Voupouras delineate the crisis of values in a town devoted to its own commercialization, where the absence of intellectual and artistic stimulation provides a vacuum into which a man like Manolis is inevitably drawn.