The Summer with Carmen review: Gay nudist beach drama full of restless, randy energy

The word-of-mouth breakout hit of last year’s BFI Flare queer film festival The Summer with Carmen finally gets a UK cinema release, bringing us a much-needed dose of Greek sunshine in the home stretch of a long winter. And some tanned flesh too: a gay nudist beach in Athens is an integral location in Zacharias Mavroeidis’s enjoyably playful debut feature, which takes its tonal cue from the restless, randy energy of that environment.

Revolving around dreamy ex-actor Demosthenes (Yorgos Tsiantoulas) and his aspiring filmmaker friend Nikitas (Andreas Labropoulos) as they delve through the past in search of inspiration for the latter’s first film, it’s a very meta affair indeed.

When Nikitas gets a directive from a producer that his debut be “fun, sexy, Greek and low budget”, it’s hard not to imagine that Mavroeidis was working to much the same brief.
As they survey the beach one idle, cruisy afternoon while brainstorming screenplay ideas, a passing dog reminds the friends of another mutt — the Carmen of the title — that Demosthenes looked after two summers before, during a tumultuous period of relationship trouble and family crisis.

Demosthenes thinks this memory has cinematic potential, and the film duly tangles past and present, as the friends equally ponder the script of their own lives, and how they might emerge heroically from the chaos. It’s light, lithe and funny, buoyantly performed by its two leads, with an astute sense of how gay friendships sometimes straddle the line between platonic and more erotic needs. (Likewise, the film divides its attention between empathetic emotional intelligence and serving its audience some straight-up eye candy.)

Think Sebastian Silva’s Rotting in the Sun with a slightly brighter outlook on the world. It promises much from Mavroeidis’s next film, and one hopes he heads back to the beach to dream it up.

The Summer with Carmen is in UK cinemas now