In “Guys and Balls” (“Manner wie wir”), Ecki (Maximilian Bruckner) is the goaltender for Boldrup F.C., a local German semi-pro soccer team, and he has ambitions to play professionally. During a big game, in which victory would mean promotion and more money, Ecki blows the save of a last-minute penalty kick and is teased mercilessly and insulted by his disappointed teammates, particularly the thuggish Udo (Carlo Ljubek).

Dejected, Ecki finds himself roughhousing with one of the more sympathetic members of the team until, in a convenient entanglement of limbs, it seems natural for Ecki to kiss him. Just at this moment, Udo happens along and loudly announces: “Now I understand it! We’ve got a queer for a keeper!”

“I don’t understand it myself,” Ecki tells his stunned and disapproving father (Dietmar Bar). He has had a girlfriend, Cordula (Judith Hoersch), whom we have seen on the verge of offering herself to him, but Udo’s taunt brings the sudden realization that he is gay.

Directed by Sherry Horman and written by Benedikt Gollhardt, “Guys and Balls” expresses the enduring gay fantasy that those involved in such manly pursuits as soccer are latent homosexuals. And Ecki’s acceptance of gay consciousness is rocket-like in its rapidity. When Udo has him kicked off the team, he challenges Boldrup to a match against a team of gay footballers, to be assembled by him in four weeks’ time.

Though Ecki seems inexperienced and knows no one else who is gay, his challenge suggests the monumental self confidence of a practiced seducer. And, sure enough, when he goes off to stay with his sister Susanne (Lisa Potthoff) in Dortmund, he not only fields his team but also meets his first boyfriend, Sven (David Rott).

At the same time, the film has to hold on tight to Ecki’s inexperience in order to milk it for comedy in the gay bars of Dortmund. At one point, after he has just barely escaped losing his innocence to a terrifyingly large and leather-clad person who put him in a swing, he even tells Susanne, “I’m not so sure I’m gay.”

But the doubt soon passes. Uncer tainty belongs only to ostensibly heterosexual guys who haven’t yet realized that they are “really” gay. Thus the Turkish lad Ercin (Billey Demirtas) whom with multicultural enthusiasm Ecki recruits from behind the counter at his family’s restaurant assures the other players that his hero, the English star David Beckham, is gay.

“But he has a wife and two kids,” objects one of them.

“Doesn’t matter. He’s gay as Tonto. He just doesn’t know it yet.”

There are, of course, various kinds of gayness, and the film shows the gamut of gay stereotypes, from leather-clad bikers to the mincing and effeminate Ercin. Though this is meant to imply some diversity, what all of them have in common is the ironclad certainty that they are defined by their sexuality.

When the two sides meet in the inevitable Big Game at the climax of the film, even the war-chant of the Boldrup lads – “Bang ’em, bang ’em, cream the queers!” – is meant to suggest that Udo and Company are hostile because they are in denial about their own latent homosexuality.

But the film also insists, rather self-contradictorily, that there can be any number of men who think themselves straight but who are really gay, but never any who think themselves gay but are really straight.

Like “Brokeback Mountain” and other gay-themed movies of recent years, the real point of “Guys and Balls” is that indulging the sexual appetite without constraint is not so much a right as a sacred duty – indeed, the sacred duty, since it nullifies even the holy bond of marriage.

Thus Rudolf (Christian Berkel), one of the leather guys, says to his 8-year-old son, Jan (Marcel Nievelstein), whom he apparently hasn’t seen in two years: “It took me a very long time to find out who I am, and then I couldn’t stay with you anymore.”

This seems to be intended literally, since Rudolf’s ex-wife and Jan’s mother (Sybille Schedwill) is a malevolent harpy who has somehow managed to obtain a court order preventing him from seeing his son. How she could have done that in this day and age – in progressive Germany – we forbear to inquire. Nevertheless, the idea of “who I am” as the excuse for every sort of self-indulgence and dereliction of duty echoes behind her exaggerated villainy.

jbowman@nysun.com