To Kalokairi tis Karmen
Zacharías Mavroidís (2023)
Zacharías Mavroidís’s comedy announces its meta credentials immediately. Along with eye-catching images of a place and the people in it, Mavroidís gives viewers plenty to read on the screen. For starters, ‘the four golden rules of screenwriting:
1 – Every movie has three acts
2 – Every movie has a hero
3 – Every hero has a goal
4 – Every hero changes in pursuit of his goal’.
Opening shots of the film’s two main characters are accompanied by biographical summaries. Demosthenes (Yorgos Tsiantoulas) is ‘the hero, 33, former actor, now a public servant’. Nikitas (Andreas Lampropoulos) is ‘the hero’s friend, 27, former actor, now a film director’. To be precise, a would-be film writer-director – Nikitas is trying to devise a scenario that finds favour with movie producer Jean-Sébastien who, Nikitas says, has asked for something fun, sexy, Greek, queer and low budget. Demosthenes (Demos) and Nikitas are spending the day – a gloriously sunny day – on an Athens beach. The Summer of Carmen‘s narrative moves back and forth between their conversations there and the events of two summers ago, which mostly concern Demos’s love life or, at least, his sex life. He and Nikitas debate turning those events into a script that meets Jean-Sébastien’s specifications.
The title character is a dog – a little mongrel with huge ears: Carmen looks a cross between Jack Russell and chihuahua. Demos and his partner of four years, Panos (Nikolas Mihas), split. Soon after, Panos acquires Carmen. When he urgently needs a dog-sitter, he asks his ex to help out, and Demos agrees. When he later discovers that Panos is planning to get rid of the dog (and probably seeing other men), Demos begs to look after Carmen again. He can’t keep her indefinitely because he’s out all day at work but Carmen finds a home elsewhere in the family: after Demos’s father dies, his mother (Roubini Vasilakopoulou) adopts the dog, showing more affection for Carmen than she has for either her son or her dying husband. The Summer with Carmen is consistently meta: Zacharías Mavroidís and Xenofón Chalátsis, who wrote the the screenplay with him, launch the closing credits with the film’s six ‘Messages in order of appearance’ (details below). Its knowing edge certainly gives the piece shape and focus it would otherwise lack but it’s limiting, too.
Despite her appealing presence, Carmen is rather a symbolic creature – she represents, as well as Demos and Panos’s unease at ending their relationship, the acidulous mother’s way of filling a sudden gap in her life. Mavroidís and Chalátsis understand that only too well, of course; it follows that so do Demos and Nikitas, who say as much. This is what’s smart and airtight about the set-up. Mavroidís, through self-awareness, swerves or pre-empts criticism. For example, in the two-years-ago part, there are enough graphic sex scenes to get you wondering (in this viewer’s case, worrying) if you’re merely watching soft porn; in the present day, Nikitas expresses a similar anxiety about including sex scenes, making clear he considers porn artistically unworthy of him – as well as not what Jean-Sébastien might want. Nikitas’s remark leaves us in no doubt that Mavroidís himself is both aware that The Summer of Carmen could attract charges of pornography and intent on delivering Jean-Sébastien’s list of ingredients. The film is certainly Greek and queer and it couldn’t have cost a fortune. The critical consensus in the UK to date, though there aren’t many reviews yet on Rotten Tomatoes, is that it’s also sexy and fun.
Some of those reviews, labelling Mavroidís’s essential setting a gay nudist beach, have compared it to the setting of Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake (2013). There’s a bit to unpack in the comparison. Unlike Guiraudie’s lakeside personnel, not all Mavroidís’s beach people are male, though most are. While some are actively homosexual in the cliffs above the beach, one older bloke just wants to watch and/or have a bit of social contact; an older woman – another dog owner – is a bit of an oddball, too. The (un)dress code and cruising protocols are more flexible than in Stranger by the Lake: swarthy beefcake Demos is usually completely naked on the beach whereas slight, queeny Nikitas never is. Beyond the generic gulf between the two films, The Summer with Carmen is relatively thin: Stranger is an erotic murder story; Carmen, though even more physically explicit, is pink candyfloss, its lack of substance sometimes emphasised by that physical explicitness, as well as by the film’s self-referential approach. When the camera is scrutinising various sections of the leading man’s exposed body, it’s a struggle not to think this is just a different kind of objectifying male gaze. When the camera on the beach supplies, as it occasionally does, a shot of male genitalia without bothering even to show the rest of their owner (let alone characterising him), The Summer with Carmen seems even more a peep show. The land-and-seascape, luminously captured by DP Theódoros Michópoulos, is easier on the eye and the mind.
As Nikitas, Andreas Lampropoulos is sensitive and funny though his character is contrasted almost too neatly with Yorgos Tsiantoulas’s Demosthenes – build, voice, temperament, type. Tsiantoulas is sometimes funny, too, but also gives off an impacted melancholy whose strength isn’t a matter of the actor’s imposing physique. This quality lends some depth to the obvious reasons for Demos’s sadness – unloving mother, homophobic father, differently unsatisfying liaisons with sexually compromised Panos and his successor, Thymios (Vasilis Tsigristaris), who gets top marks for bedroom performance but who, as Demos confides to Nikitas, is also a ‘bit boring’. The film isn’t too clear about Demos’s promiscuity. It’s a given to the extent that he needs eventually to move beyond it (according to the fourth golden rule of screenwriting): Demos comes to recognise, in his feelings for Nikitas, the importance of platonic friendship. I was never sure, though, how much Demos was meant to have controlled his needs during his four years with Panos, especially since he’s found Panos a somewhat frustrating partner.
I’ve written more negatively and earnestly than intended about The Summer with Carmen. I did enjoy the film, which is often witty and entertaining. I liked how Nikitas, in his less obvious moments, comes across as someone genuinely trying to write a decent screenplay: when he rejects suggestions from Demos, who insists these make sense because they really happened, Nikitas makes the excellent point that that’s not enough in creative writing. ‘Reality is not always realistic’ ends up as the third of the film’s six concluding messages. It’s preceded by ‘There are straight people who don’t look it’ and ‘Every mother has felt embarrassed for her child’; and followed by ‘We are all sad little sissies’, ‘Self-knowledge is a convenient self-deception’ and ‘Bisexuals are real’. How thoroughly Mavroidís has illustrated all these points – as distinct from simply including them as lines in the script – is open to question. So, too, is how seriously he and Xenofón Chalátsis mean some of them.
It’s worth staying with The Summer with Carmen right through the closing credits. As these roll, Mavroidís shows minor characters leaving the beach in the evening twilight: the solitary elderly man, for the first and only time, speaks to someone – the woman with the dog – without being rebuffed. Meta-ness has the last word, though, albeit spoken rather than text on the screen. The two principals stand side by side, taking a pee (in backview, thank goodness) before they head off from the beach. ‘Why don’t we,’ one says to the other, ‘make the screenplay a movie within a movie?’
1 May 2025
