Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Greek comedy The Summer with Carmen is another film about filmmaking — this time, about making them strictly in your head. It is about screenwriting, to be precise — and about the friendship between two men. The main location is a gay beach where, while observing the deadpan comedy that goes on among the sunseekers, Demos (Yorgos Tsiantoulas) and Nikitas (Andreas Labropoulos) muse on the latter’s plans for a movie. The idea they hothouse is based on the events of a previous summer, evoked in stylised flashbacks.Divided into acts, each titled accordingly (Set-Up, Confrontation, etc), with captions flashing up key terms of screenwriting lore (eg The Hero’s Goal), this is a very in-jokey film, an extended and somewhat forced wink at viewers who have pored over screenwriting manuals by the likes of Robert McKee and flung them away in exasperation. It is a movie about nothing, almost Seinfeldian in its cultivation of knowing inconsequentiality.It is also boisterously sexual in its full-on depictions of Demos’s love life. Spending much of the film naked, the heavily bearded Tsiantoulas, who seems freshly hewn from a slab of the Peloponnese, resembles a Tom of Finland version of Popeye’s muscleman foe Bluto. His sensitive and lugubrious Demos makes a nice comic pairing with Labropoulos’s scrawny, camp live-wire Nikitas. Carmen, meanwhile, is a small, anxious-looking dog previously belonging to Demos’s ex-boyfriend Panos; but the reference is also to Bizet’s Carmen, featured here in a drag interlude. Written by director Zacharias Mavroeidis and Xenofon Chalatsis, The Summer with Carmen plays like a comedy version of Alain Guiraudie’s 2013 cruising drama Stranger by the Lake, with a dash of early, scrappier Almodóvar. The film is likeable, daring and ebulliently queer but, for all the obsession with plot structure, a shapeless ramble. Still, it sticks defiantly to its credo of “the more meta, the better”.★★★☆☆In UK cinemas from February 28
