Well this is a delight. A playfully meta Greek-language film about film-making, set largely on a gay nudist beach near Athens, The Summer With Carmen is so breezily sun-kissed and adorable that you could prescribe it as a cure for seasonal affective disorder. Or you could, were it not for all the full-frontal male nudity and cottaging. As the waves lazily lap against the buttocks of hopeful strangers checking each other out, best friends Demosthenes (Yorgos Tsiantoulas) and Nikitas (Andreas Labropoulos) have other things on their minds. Nikitas, a former actor turned aspiring writer-director has been approached by a producer looking for a new project. The criteria – fun, sexy, Greek, queer, low budget – seems like a perfect fit. Nikitas just needs to come up with an idea. Demosthenes suggests the events of a past summer – with a break-up; a hook-up or 10; and a small, worried-looking stray dog named Carmen. And through a series of deft flashbacks and some peppy, irreverent on-screen inter-titles, the tale unfolds and Nikitas’s screenplay takes shape.
The story itself is fairly insubstantial – some bickering, plenty of family drama and just a hint of personal growth for self-absorbed beefcake Demosthenes. But the lively telling of it is where the considerable charm of the film lies. Director Zacharias Mavroeidis strikes a deft balance, between gently mocking his two central characters and celebrating their enduring bond; between sentiment and saltiness; between adhering to the rules of screenwriting and skewering them. But for something as frothy and seemingly frivolous as it is, the film also delivers crisply observed characters and fully lived-in relationships: Demosthenes’s scenes with his impossible-to-please, drama queen of a mother are so stingingly perceptive, they make your eyes smart.
In UK and Irish cinemas
